An interesting after-thought on Microsoft, Viruses, Corporate and Governmental Espionage and You
Yes, once again its doom and gloom for your PC and all from some code that may have been written in Russia, India or China. By now you should be reading several things into this story and start asking more questions about just what you are doing online. Let me make some Major MOOT points here…
1 The banks and every online retailer are telling us just how secure we can do our purchasing and banking online much to my own disagreement. This false sense of security has actually made our entire system venerable to attack whether it is from some young kid in Russia or the government of North Korea, China, Iran or whoever would like to disrupt/end our way life.
2 If you are upset, scared or just pissed-off, let me make matters worse and tell you that this is one of those viruses we know about, somewhat, and there are plenty more that will be modeled after this ones success has been determined even though at this point we do not know just what this conficker (also called configure) virus will get in its update on the 1st of April. But take into consideration the ones that we do not know about yet, sleeping and hopefully discovered before they execute.
3 Microsoft has a patch that, assuming you are not infected at this point, you would have got in their automatic update service. Most viruses exploit a failure in operating system or network programming (poorly written code) that is most often just band-aided-over with the patches only to be exploited again in a new way at a future time. Most viruses are not new but derived from old viruses that worked in some way but a programmer can see where the code was in error and even add some new exploits to the mix to create a better monster. Kinda like gene splitting so to speak. Every new rush to market product Microsoft has put out there has even more of these programming lapses or exploits polluting them than the last version.
Some questions you should ask yourself…
Even if bank accounts and your credit cards are as secure as they say they are with your online actions, who will guarantee the security of you PC when you log on and do business with them. Certainly not the banks or credit cards, not your virus scanner manufacture either. This is where you are most venerable. And now lets include the fact that the banks are not as secure as they would say and do not let it be known when they have had a problem as to not scare you from their new teller-less and paperless profit model. I can only guess that unless confronted with a proof positive security breach you will never know how many times your information may have been stolen as we have found out from some of the credit card companies. So you really are on your own out there and it is time someone actually told you that.
But here is a interesting MOOT point…
Microsoft when trying to disrupt every competitor, will normally just include competing software as built-in their next operating system that can not be removed. Examples like Internet Explorer (Netscape Navigator) Windows Media Player (Real Player), Microsoft Messenger (AOL Instant Messenger) so why don’t they provide a virus scanner built in as most of the viruses are from faulty code that belongs to them anyway. No, you need to buy that software, they will not build it in. “Go CONFICKER” ??? Maybe next they will charge us for each bug fix update. Boy how the auto industry would love to have a business model like that… or do they now?