Many news outlets reported that on 4/1/2009 (today), the world would be crippled by a virus known as Conflicker, which would infect host computers and prevent the computer from updating, among other malfeasance. Dailykos was one of the news outlets that promoted this scare.
A front-page story at BBC is titled "Worm attack chaos fails to strike". To quote the article briefly:
Those monitoring the progress of the worm as 1 April dawned around the globe said there was no evidence it was doing anything other than modifying itself to be harder to exterminate.
However, they do add that "security experts warned that there was no room for complacency." This reminds me a bit of the color-coded warnings that Tom Ridge and the Bush cabal promoted, which seem to have accomplished nothing except to unsettle people.
There's another goal here, though: many of the media reports (including the one at DailyKos) provided a link to the security company McAfee. According to Wikipedia McAfee's revenue was US$1.6 billion; I don't know how many people download McAfee's free security patch, but I suggest that Conflicker was a profitable marketing venture for McAfee.
It's suspicious that McAfee had a fix for Conflicker IMMEDIATELY (one might think that if they were actually responding to the threat, it would take them some time to find the fix). Spreading viruses is a crime, however, and one which I have no evidence that McAfee commits. The damaging viruses are usually ascribed to some specific person outside McAfee, although they clearly do have a strong motive for viruses to be written.
One reason that McAfee could've had the fix immediately is that they have thoroughly investigated the security holes in Windows, and that as soon as Conflicker hits they just searched their library for something that would solve the problem. Microsoft could have even let them in on Microsoft's testing results, to clue McAfee in on security problems so that McAfee would be prepared to fix them.
It's not in McAfee's interest for Microsoft to actually make their product work properly though. The media reports did not ask why that security hole that Conflicker exploits exists in the first place. Microsoft is choosing to lay off workers, instead of making their operating system product secure.
This piece may sound tinfoil hat-ish, and it's true that Microsoft has contributed greatly to the economy in my area (Seattle). But whenever these virus alerts come out I wonder why Microsoft still has such glaring problems, nearly 40 years after the composition of the first computer virus.
A final link I want to provide: the YouTube of Wierd Al's song "virus alert".