Reflections 18. Conficker , flickr and other malaises

The Conficker worm is awaiting new orders from the "masters" on the Fool's day this year. The worm was first identified in the "wild" back in October 2008, since then he was propagating in the Internet, occasionally updating himself with the new versions. Close to 10 mln computers around the world are suspect to be infected by the worm. Most of the infected computers are part of the bigger networks in governments and corporations and not the private PC. It was leaked that even UK Parlament network might be infected. Microsoft issued numerous warnings and offered a sweet bounty of 250k US$ to help her find authors of the worm. Aside from the usual ways of infecting computers connected to the Internet, this worm is also able to exploit autorun feature set for USB removable devices.




On the other hand

Ed Amoroso, Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer of AT&T, told a Congressional Committee on 20 March that cybercrime was a $1trn a year business.

Good call to ask the question is it a slipped gaffe or intentional act ? Good exercise to train a public for accepting numbers of trillions dollars through official sources.
I'm not that much paranoic person but trillions make me trembling, no matter trillions of what be it a cyber crime dollars or american bailouts... People are absolutely out of touch how really mind boggling that number is. Quoting from wikipedia

The million is sometimes used in the English language as a metaphor for a very large number, as in "Never in a million years" and "You're one in a million", or a hyperbole, as in "I've walked a million miles".

Now, trillion is million times million. It is a basic math but sometimes you ought to use those skills taught in kinder garten :)

It is almost for sure that this number is highly exaggerated, you may read about the origins of the meme here.

According to market research firm Gartner, all the software business revenues worldwide expected to total $222.6bn in 2009 only.