Have you also experienced an ever-growing number of those ‘greeting card’ messages and emails? You’d better not open them, especially if you run that old-fashioned proprietary (read: business) operating system from Redmond, also known as ‘Vista’, or any of its predecessors.
An estimated number of 1.7 million computers got infected that way by what is known as the ‘Storm Worm‘. And these machines are waiting for instructions from their masters, which is what nice robots should do.
Now we are all waiting for a real massive attack. It could be against a company, or even a country - whatever will bring enough money into the originator’s pockets; we will see.
What do we learn from this? A few well-known points, actually:
- You’d better not run closed systems, but free software, and that also means free operating systems
- Security through obscurity doesn’t work, period.
- Employees: Don’t even touch these Windows systems, without telling your employer about the risks first.
- Employers/business owners/big corporations: get rid of these machines as fast as possible, and change to better systems and software. Or do you want to see your company in the big news as an attacker next time?
Hopefully, there will be a time when all those companies switch to better systems. But on the other hand: the terms ‘business’ and ‘intelligence’ never went very well together…
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Keep in mind that the “victim” of the speculated attack need not be running on a Microsoft platform. The Internet is the transport, the Microsoft systems are the tool, but the sabateur is the cause.
Yes, I was wondering what the heck was with all the greeting cards I’m supposedly getting cause that really went crazy for the last few days (and increasing). It’s a pity that my email address is in their spammy path. :\
Anyway, as usual I just ignore and delete that crap, and I am also running Free Software (GNU/Linux).
Hopefully not too many people get hurt by this, but they should really have each of these kinds of attacks as yet another in an already big pile of quite huge reasons for switching to Free Software.
Cheers