The Commoner's Virus

The Commoner's Virus
George Smith, 2002-06-10

Despite its virulence, the Klez worm is ignored by the newspapers and dismissed by the digerati. Could the demographics of its victims be a factor?

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The Commoner's Virus 2002-06-10
Jon Horner, CISSP

I've had to clean the Klez from the computers of a few friends. They each tell me that they know not to just execute anything that came in, and they know how to protect themselves, but didn't. They know to keep their antivirus updated, but didn't bother.

That is why this doesn't affect most p...

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Klez and defenses 2002-06-10
Nicholas Weaver (2 replies)

That mailworms continue to be a plague is rather frustrating, not because it is a "commoner's disease" but because they could be effectively stopped with some simple, effective policies.

1) NO mailreader should ever execute content. The only option should be "save to disk". Just warning and ex...

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re: Klez and defenses 2002-06-13
David Byrne

While your suggestions would almost certainly have a positive effect, they don?t match business reality. An employer can easily set restrictions on executable content and the like, but an ISP will lose customers if they tried. An ISP customer expects fast, complete e-mail service. If a known virus i...

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Klez and defenses 2002-06-14
Anonymous

I feel you've made some very valid points, Especially option #1, that I feel is the root cause of the problem. I can see no valid reason why a Mail program needs to automatically excecute anything.

However, option #2 is not as simple as it sounds. It sounds like a good idea, but in practice it ca...

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