More Windows viruses – Who is to blame?

As I am being innundated by the latest Windows virus, I wonder, yet again, who is to blame for this nonsense.

This particular virus does not take advantage of any Microsoft vulnerability, but, instead, relies on the user to save the attachment, and then run it.

I find myself leaning towards Ron’s take on this. He’s right, I suppose. The user shouldn’t have to know this sort of stuff.

Mail server admins, on the other hand, should know about this stuff. If, for example, your mail server has in place the very basic precaution of dropping Windows binary attachments, you’ll drop a significant percentage of this particular virus.

As per my earlier note, just adding a line to drop .zip attachments will get the rest of it.

It also requires a bit of vigilance. I noticed that my mail server was suffering under some additional load, and investigated why that was the case. And then I took action. With the ENORMOUS volume of these messages that I’m seeing, apparently a lot of mail admins didn’t do that.

I’m seeing about 2 of these a second now. So 7200 an hour. And I usually process about 2000 messages a day.