Will the internet collapse at 3pm today?

brianleahy

brianleahy

Colonel Panic
From:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...2&u=/nm/20030822/tc_nm/tech_internet_virus_dc

LONDON (Reuters) - Computer security experts raced to beat the clock on Friday as the super-potent Sobig.F email virus threatened to unleash a crippling barrage of data across the Internet.

.....

Hidden within the virus is an instruction to the infected machines to make contact at 3 p.m. EDT with the 20 computers, which host an unidentified program..... Even if the mystery program is a harmless gag, the sheer volume of Internet data converging on the 20 computer targets could slow the Internet to a crawl.
 
Yep, looks like this disaster is a no-show. Either they got the target machines taken down, or there are fewer active copies of the virus than they thought.
 
Personally, I think [enter skeptic mode] that it's a play by all the techies who didn't get to push the red button back when y2k failed to bring civilization to its knees.
Viruses come and go and this one seems sticky, but it's nothing like sars.
That said, when the top IT dude at my company sent out a few broadcast about users getting their (peecee) laptops upgraded or face a system blockout, I was able to respond with "Should have gotten Macs for everyone". :)
Wait, sory, gotta go. There's 876 e-mails to go through... not.
 
No way would all that traffic slow the Internet to a crawl. There are thousands upon thousands of servers worldwide providing bandwidth to millions of users, and sending traffic from a few hundred thousand to one of 20 computers isn't going to make more than a blip.

It's 5:21 PT and so far, everything still works.
 
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