Storm Worm Rising 218
The Storm worm has been an increasing problem in the last few months, but a change in tactics may mean something big is going to happen. The article discusses a bit of back story about the worm, including the somewhat frightening numbers about the millions of spam emails carrying the worm payload. They estimate between a quarter and a million infected systems usable for spam or DDOS attacks.
Microsoft is going to lose big (Score:3, Insightful)
NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
NO! It's annoying enough that Google rapes through my
If I'm working on a c++ program at work and zip it up and gmail it home (lock the computer while it uploads) and forget to 'make clean'
"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been shown that in countless movies and TV shows and by "experts" on the news.
They're the ones you see claiming that Linux and Mac's will have the "same problems" as their market share increases.
With all the past outbreaks on Windows machines, anyone who wanted to migrate has already started their migration. This won't change anything for anyone else.
Re:How are these numbers calculated? (Score:2, Insightful)
All I'm saying is that I doubt the methods used to estimate these numbers would stand up to close scrutiny. That's not to say this isn't interesting (the number could be higher than the estimate after all), but I'd rather the article just said "we don't know how many machines are infected, but it's likely to be a lot".
Mandatory Disconnect of Infected Computers (Score:3, Insightful)
Then if a botnet attack comes, turn off the overseas pipes as needed. Yeah I am a dreamer, but I am at least half way practical.
I don't think we'll ever see a solution... (Score:2, Insightful)
Without those measures, we'll never have any sort of decent widespread security, it will always be too little, too late, catch up crap and the big dogs still raking in the billions for perpetual beta-crapware
Now free software I don't have as much of a problem with, as they don't charge any money for it, but the stuff that costs serious folding money-needs a normal consumer warranty.
Re:What does God need with a starship? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't think we'll ever see a solution... (Score:1, Insightful)
Cut the breakline on your car and see if it falls under your car's warranty.
Re:Question on that article (Score:3, Insightful)
The companies that care enough about their security issues are those with critical servers, and many of these use win 2K3.
Storm affecting these boxes would mean quicker detection of the virus, and lesser migration. Without these (and with users who dont update anti-virus signatures very regularly), the virus has a greater potential of spreading. Of course, the author didn't imagine Storm would be this popular, and that this anti-2k3 trick wouldn't really matter.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't think we'll ever see a solution... (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe what we have here is a free market. If you don't like the non-warranty offered by one company, don't buy their product. Buy the one product from a company that does give the warranty you want.
Or one could buy the product that doesn't get turned into a zombie. Thus spake the Apple fanboy. ;-)
Re:I don't think we'll ever see a solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More information (Score:4, Insightful)
For me the biggest problem with these is that there is no attachment for AV to pick off and there is hardly any text and no real advertising in the email so our spam filters don't block it either.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why wouldn't YouTube work with Linux? YouTube runs on Linux. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=youtube.
There is a Linux version of flash, it was behind for a while but YouTube still worked even then. I have no problems playing videos on Linux, I do have problems with friends using Microsoft Windows playing anything I send them that isn't a Microsoft Windows media player file.
Re:"The silent majority" isn't here. (Score:3, Insightful)
They could indeed. Probably not those particular ones however. The show is callled Grumpy Old Women [bbc.co.uk] and takes a handful of the BBC's more curmudgeonly female celebs and gives them free rein to gripe about the things that wind them up. Not as good as Grumpy Old Men (IMHO) but that could be down to gender bias on my part.
The "silent majority" however (and no, it's not my choice of phrase, either) don't on the whole do such things. Most of the non geeks I've spoken to use their computer for surfing, p2p, messaging, email or WP. That's not generally a controversial opinion, even among the Redmond faithful.
If that was what I was doing, (and I don't accept that Linux is deficient in comparison to Windows) then I'd be more likely to use the term "disingenuous". But you know, saying that Windows is better because it has software which little old ladies may someday want to use to program their knitting machines.. well that's like saying Linux is better because they may someday decide to learn C and write their own device drivers. I suppose each argument has merit to the extent that the relevant scenario is possible; I just don't think either probability to be particularly high, which renders the arguments rather less than compelling.
On the other hand, sooner or later someone is going to write a Linux package to drive those knitting machines. Of course windows may get less annoying in the same time frame. But there are people who don't have knitting machines who might prefer not to wait for either occurrence.