I just read the following article…

Computer Virus ‘Time Bomb’ Could Go Off April 1
(http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510296,00.html)

My thoughts…

The Internet is a dangerous place. It seems highly likely that “Conficker” is going to do something, and it should be of great concern to everyone, but particularly IT people, that we know about this worm, but still have no idea what it is designed to do. Talk about a weakness of the “filtering” mentality. Don’t forget… It is nearly impossible to filter for something that is not yet known.

With history as our guide, it is highly likely this worm will include an e-mail based component. The bad news for people who are protected by current anti-spam filtering technologies is that they will be left virtually naked until the worm actually starts working. Only then will the developers of the filters be able to design rule sets to deal with the worm. This is the definition of being reactive. In addition, once the rule sets are defined, they do no good until they are pushed out (deployed).

It would not surprise me if we saw an exponential increase in threat-laden email when this worm comes to life. However, I do not think the people that design these sorts of worms are targeting the email infrastructure. I believe email is used as a virtual “smoke screen” these days. This virtual “smoke screen” is used to mask the real targets of the worm or virus.