What would happen if a worldwide computer pandemic erupted? It’s not too farfetched to liken it to the breakdown of the social order when the Black Death swept the civilization in the 14th century:

One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbor troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs.

Just as the social fabric of trust was rent asunder by fear of contracting the plague, terror of contracting a fatal computer virus would cause us to shun emails from even the most trustworthy friends, family and business associates. Nor would we have any way of knowing if we could rely on any website no matter how reliable it claims to be. And of course, with paranoia running rampant, your own communications would be blocked as well.

If these dark thoughts sound familiar, it’s because you heard them in the days leading up to the end of the last millennium as doomsayers predicted the collapse of the Internet when the world’s clocks advanced from the 20th century to the 21st.

Luckily, nothing happened. Life, and the Web, went on.

Let’s hope that when the second hand crosses the 12 at the passage of March 31st to April 1st, things will be just as uneventful as Y2K-Plus-One-Second.

A number of malware watchers are worried we will be plunged into the technological Dark Ages, however. They are telling us about some evil geniuses who have produced a Worm called Conficker that has already burrowed into some 12 million computers and is set to unleash a plague of unprecedented ferocity using the multiplier effect of countless zombie computer hosts created inadvertently by folks like you and me when we obliviously click on links to interesting websites. What the actual effect will be, no one quite knows, but speculation has exercised the some of the best imaginations in the security field.

“One researcher, Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the idea of a ‘Dark Google.’” writes John Markoff in the New York Times. “What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers?”

On the other hand, you could wake up on April 1st with a popup message that says Ha-Ha! April Fool!

Patches have been created for the Microsoft OS, the vulnerable target of Conficker. But the creators of the Doomsday Worm have already reconfigured – or reConfickered – the program to possibly render these patches and other security software useless. You can and probably should run a backup on March 31st. But if your computer bears the plague the day before, it will bear it the day after.

Any other bright ideas?

Here’s hoping that the worst thing that happens to you April 1st is a hotfoot.

RC