24Mar/090
NYT: The Conficker Worm: April Fool’s Joke or Unthinkable Disaster?
Interesting article at the NYT about the Conficker worm:
Given the sophisticated nature of the worm, the question remains: What is the purpose of Conficker, which could possibly become the world’s most powerful parallel computer on April 1? That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with each one. The authors then only need to register one of the domain names in order to take control of the millions of zombie computers that have been created.
One fictional example of a massive cyber-disaster I've heard of is *****'s Kiss, but I haven't actually seen the show it's on, .hack.
Massive Botnet: coming to a computer near you April 1, 2009.