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There was a lot of hype drummed up in recent days about the most recent variant of the Conficker worm, which was supposed to deliver some sort of nasty payload today. Opinions varied widely about how extensive it would be and how much damage it would do. A number of security experts debunked claims that it would be anything serious, claiming it to be mostly just hype. Many security companies, on the other hand, were adamant that it would be a horrible scourge that you must protect yourself from.

Regardless of what you believed, the payload day has come. How has it panned out? So far, it's been largely a bust. The infected machines, which ranged from 3 million up to 12 million, have apparently not been taking part of any mass denial of service, and things are still quite normal on the Internet. Was it Microsoft's patches together with alertness among network administrators? Or perhaps was Conficker a misfire? There's nothing stopping it from still becoming a problem down the road, as 12 million infected machines isn't anything to ignore. But for all the hype, Conficker has largely failed to do much damage.