I don't usually, but... 10053

On Mon, 08 Aug 2005 02:59:10 +0000, Rich Bell

What you are not taking into consideration is the snowball effect. Suppose a new peice of malware slips by the gatekeepers and ends up in some clueless user's inbox. They execute (or have executed for them) the subsequent attachment and all hell breaks loose. Now you have a virus-worm-trojan-whatever running around *inside* the network, it in turn takes advantage of some new found flaw in Windows to subsequently infect as many systems on the network as possible, including servers. Then it uses these compromised systems to send itself to a bunch of other persons outside of the network.

Sound unbelievable? It's not, it's happened on more than one occbuttion. So you see, you can't blame the vulnerability of Windows totally on clueless users. With big outbreaks, all it takes is one clueless user to bring the poostorm.

Blame the admins for not keeping the systems up to date and avsigs current? Fine, but what about when the malware is so new that the signature files for it haven't even been propogated yet? What about if the vulnerability in Windows hasn't been patched yet? This is all very realistic.

What's not realistic is your atbreastude towards the inherent insecurities of that platform as compared to Linux.

-- rapskat - 00:19:29 up 13 days, 9:34, 9 users, load average: 0.27, 0.58, 0.60 "Maybe is an Ambivalent Yet Beguiling Enigma"