Hackers far scarier than terrorists

Internet porn, teenage "sexting," music piracy, Nigerian scammers and MySpace bullies: the undisputed scourges of the Internet. Right?

But like 1940s media and popular press worrying that nuclear bombs would set the oxygen in the air on fire, or initiate " a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom," the boogeymen that haunt our modernized closets are, quite possibly, among the least of our problems.

Why? The Bomb's greatest danger wasn't brilliantly flaming atmospheres but invisible gamma radiation. And computers aren't going to destroy the planet because they help teenagers hook up - but CPUs may well push society off its axis if they continue to evolve beyond our general comprehension.

Computers haven't quite reached the "What do you think you're doing, Dave?" stage, of course. But that doesn't mean evolution isn't the proper framework to consider their advancement. After all, producing, programming and hacking computers takes some serious business chops, and we're all familiar with the whole market competition thing.

So consider the Conficker virus, which entered the world in October 2008. Microsoft released a patch to protect against Conficker completely on Oct. 15. By December, 500,000 were infected by the virus. By late February, around 15 million were infected - by a virus patched in October.

The Conficker virus has mutated dozens of times since its inception, grounding French jet fighters, infecting British and German military systems, shutting down the computer network of the Houston court system, and being found lingering on hospital computers in New Zealand, England and the U.S. Conficker hasn't done much - yet - but with its ability to auto-update itself, there's literally anything that it might do. And the world's coordinated "health response" to this serious digital pandemic?

Microsoft offered a $250,000 bounty on the head of the virus creator.

A bounty. It's like the Wild West meets AIDS. Guess who wins. Microsoft could have offered its anti-Conficker patch to all Windows users, but like vengeful politicians denying clean needles to heroin addicts, the company decided that only owners of registered copies of Windows could access the patch. Fully within Microsoft's rights, sure. Selfish and damaging to the world's technological health, definitely.

Not that all those offered with free security decided to take it, anyway. Apparently, a lot of people find patching too arduous to bother with, even when a big ol' "DOWNLOAD THIS CRITICAL PATCH" flashes up on their screen. Which, to be honest, is an understandable position. How is it that Conficker can update itself invisibly and automatically, but patching Windows requires one to reboot a computer about 20 times?

Maybe because virus writers have the evolutionary incentive to write clean code. If Windows code crashes, the Windower complains, reboots, and buys the next copy of Windows that comes out. If a virus crashes or can't update, that's lost profit for its writer - because hacking has gone way beyond the mother's basement, "Haha, 0wn3d" days. Laughs come and go, but millions of dollars are forever - especially if you live in a poverty-ridden developing nation.

After all, what countries have hundreds of thousands of poor, college-educated, possibly-disaffected potential hackers? The names are on the tip of my tongue, but I just can't seem to get them out … one begins with RU … the other with CH … well, whatever. I mean, how big of a deal could infecting the computers that control the worlds' militaries, missiles and ICBM's possibly be?

And the privileged digital "elite" who might be able to help out the LOLCat-loving "unwashed masses" are themselves held back by a certain self-defeating sanctimony. "It's not my damn fault that millions of complacent idiots got themselves wrecked," they say. "After all, I run Linux."

Which is true. But hanging out with techie communities these days often gives me a feeling of existential déjà vu - like I'm chilling with some haughty herbalists in the 14th entury, joking about this whole "Great Plague" thing going around but laughing that, hey, we keep our houses clean of rats. So screw it!

But it's the computers of the world's hospitals, militaries, police stations and businesses that are mired in a Windows monoculture, swarming with rats, and just begging for some Plague. My laptop may be safe, sure - but that's only a quantum of solace.