Posted on 01/24/2007 7:55:46 AM PST by Halfmanhalfamazing
In twenty years of dealing with PCs professionally I have only seen two viruses in a business environment. One was in the DOS days as transmitted by a floppy, and one was Melissa. Neither caused any damage, other than taking some time to disinfect.
The folks who tried to download free music got burned pretty bad by Kazaa, but it wasn't without warning. Walk in bad neighborhoods and you can be mugged. No OS can protect itself if people insist on installing malware.
I once installed a batch of spyware included in a CNET download. My bad for assuming CNET wouldn't distribute malware.
If you install something bad from a trusted source (say Sony) you will override whatever warnings the OS might present. If it asks for a password, you will enter the password, because the source is someone you trust.
Note that every single one affected Microsoft software and ONLY Microsoft software. No where on the list is a virus or worm that affects MySQL or Apache or Solaris.
While you personally may not have encountered them, malware on Windows has cost American businesses, conservatively, tens of billions of dollars and likely well into hundreds of billions of dollars.
This does not include the cost to businesses of trying to stay ahead of the malware deluge through patching, anti-virus and anti-spyware, or the training of users and technicians to avoid and clean up infections.
Because of inherent design differences, OSX, Linux and the BSDs are substantially less susceptible to the kind of infections that plague the Microsoft family of operating systems.
The top ten, huh? Odd that it doesn't mention the only piece of malware that brought down the entire internet.
The rest are familiar. I've seen them in the log files of virus scanners. Although I manage both Exchange servers and SQL servers, I've never seen a machine affected by any of these. None of these viruses or attacks could harm a machine having routine preventive management.
As for people who have been harmed by them, I make it a point not to take advice from people who don't know how to make PCs work properly.
While there are definitely DRM issues with Vista, this isn't going to be one of them. As usual, things get twisted in media reports, and technology reporters are no different than political reporters when it comes to getting things twisted up. Changing a drive, card, or any other device isn't going to force you into a re-load, and most likely won't even result in a hiccup at all. While Vista was originally planned to limit the OS to three transfers, MS has backed off of that and given Vista the same license that XP has, which is unlimited transfers from system to system. Relax. At the very worst you may have to take two minutes to re-activate in some extreme circumstances. Nothing more.
Not odd at all, considering that the Morris worm was:
a) unleashed onto a much, much smaller Internet
b) mainly affected academic systems as there wasn't much commerce on the Internet then
c) an accident. (And therefore usually not considered malware)
The rest are familiar. I've seen them in the log files of virus scanners. Although I manage both Exchange servers and SQL servers, I've never seen a machine affected by any of these.
Then you must live under a rock, considering that 90% of businesses have experienced malware that interrupted their business at one time or another.
None of these viruses or attacks could harm a machine having routine preventive management.
Actually, Slammer was more effective against machines that hadn't been regularly patched.
A recent Microsoft patch had the effect of disabling a previous patch that fixed the vulnerability that Slammer used.
So not even rigourous and consistent management is a cure-all when you are using Windows.
OK.
Actually, Slammer was more effective against machines that had been regularly patched.
Serves me right for posting with an insufficient level of caffeine in my system.
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