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Conficker Scare: It’s the Media’s Fault
From: InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 06:16:16 -0600 (CST)
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/01/conficker-scare-its-the-medias-fault/ By Ben Worthen The Wall Street Journal April 1, 2009 The Conficker postmortems are starting. The early word: Shoot the messengers. Conficker, in case you missed it, is the computer virus that many media accounts said would be “damaging millions of computers on April Fool’s Day” (CNN), and cause “millions of computers around the world could go into meltdown” (The Sun). Now that it’s pretty clear that April 1 is a non-event, members of the self-appointed Conficker Cabal formed to stop the virus—and hype it breathlessly along the way—are passing the buck. “It’s really complicated and media outlets have a hard time understanding it,” said Rick Wesson, chief executive of security company Support Intelligence, Wednesday. He earlier called Conficker a “digital Pearl Harbor.” He has a point of course. Sensational stories sell. But every sensational Conficker story we’ve seen also quotes a few security experts making sensational claims. [...]
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