Fridrik Skulason’s open letter draws attention to another point: that while Sobig.F was scheduled to die out on Sept. 10, we might just have been lucky this time. He compares the two recent attacks — Sobig and Blaster — and concludes that if the guy or guys who write the next version of Sobig look closely, they may combin the two and create a real monster:“With Sobig.F scheduled to die out today, Sept. 10th, the problem might go away for a while – until the next similar worm appears. And this is the scary part. Sobig.F didn’t really infect that many machines world-wide, maybe only 200.000 or so. This is only a fraction of the number of machines infected by Msblaster (Lovsan). Now imagine a worm combining the distribution method of Msblaster with the mass-mailing feature of Sobig.F. The flood of traffic might practically render the Internet unusable.
“Eventually, some virus author will create a virus like this, maybe this month, maybe in a few years, but it will happen.”