The Conficker Cabal
by Gerald Trites, FCA

An underground struggle is going on with potentially high stakes worthy of a thriller novel. A group of computer experts - state of the art experts - known as the Conficker Cabal, along with Microsoft, is attempting to fight a deadly worm spreading through the world's computer systems that is known to have malicious intentions. It's authors are unlknown. The FBI , other law enforcement officials and a host of security experts are battling quitely in the background to determine the identify of the Conficker authors and to minimize or forestall the impact of the virus, which they think is intended to take effect on April 1. So far, every step the law has taken has been countered by the authors in a high tech cat and mouse game. Time is getting short, and the stakes are high.

It appears to some of the experts that the Conficker worm was built to take advantage of the cloud computing initiative, spearheaded by Sun and Microsoft, in which companies have their applications and data reside in internet based servers run by the service providers. It has been clear from the start that security is of the utmost importance in such a scenario, but the basis of going forward has been that the state of security capability for internet based applications has advanced to the point where cloud computing should not be hindered by security concerns. The Conficker worm could challenge this premise. For more on the Conficker Cabal see this article in the New York Times.