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From: dank@stealth.usc.edu (Dan King)
Newsgroups: comp.virus
Subject: Re: AF/91 and April Foolism in general
Message-ID: <0005.9104221346.AA13954@ubu.cert.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 19 Apr 91 19:15:33 GMT
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jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala) writes:
|> [ someone writes lots of babbling about lawsuits and such for an april
|> fools joke ]
|>
|> If people lack knowledge about the things they're reading and in
|> general take everything they read from newspapers as the Truth without
|> checking it first with someone competent enough to know what's it all
|> about, in my opinion they deserve all what they get.

I agree, this is perhaps the most important point that needs to be
made here.  If you read an article in a newspaper (even a normally
reputable one) about a new bullet the military had invented that flew
around corners and waited in dark alleys before striking its target,
you might want to do a little followup before getting upset.  More so
if the article ran on April 1st.

|> You're in much more trouble than some lost time if you blindly believe
|> anything you happen to read in a publication.

Exactly.

|> It seems to me that especially in the computer virus field the lack of
|> knowledge about computer security in general is often exploited by
|> various venturers.  Sure, there's nothing inherently wrong with
|> wasting your money spending it on various virus detection programs,
|> populist books and such.

Now I began to question Mr (? I may be mistaken, my apologies if you
are actually Ms) Kuoppala.

|> Computer viruses in themselves are not a big problem.  The big problem
|> is persons with no knowledge of the risks involved and no proper
|> training and/or usage policies using computer systems with nil (or
|> worse, security-by-obscurity ones) operating system and application
|> program access controls, with the programs often written by persons
|> with equal lack of knowlegde.  Add to that the lack of source code and
|> then even if the users were competent enough they couldn't find or fix
|> the holes and lacks of controls.

Hold it.  Wrong.  Dead wrong.  Computer viruses are a HUGE problem for
anyone who is even remotely connected with the maintenance of a
significant number of computers.  Ask someone who's home system has
just had its HD partition destroyed by a virus.  Ask someone who is
ready to go back to a typewriter because their new, spiffy Mac IIci
crashes at application launches due to WDEF.

Sure, if everyone was a super-hacker then viruses would have a much
harder time spreading.  Of course, viruses would probably be much
better at hiding themselves.  Proper "usage policies"?  Pray tell,
what are these?  We could set up fascist-like user rooms where users
can only submit batch jobs and never touch the computers, but we'd get
less accomplished that way.

Including source code with every program would help eliminate viruses,
but forgive me if I only pay attention to realistic options.  Likewise
running only programs not written by "persons with an equal lack of
knowledge".  Whatever that means.

Viruses are a problem.  A big one.  Are they're going to get worse.
Come on, don't pick on the users.  Attack, instead, the virus authors.
If these people would write useful code instead of malignant code,
then life would be grand.

Time to get off my soapbox, I guess.

|> //Jyrki
dank