This is a great study in how evil works. (1) It shows up as something appealing, and many people fall for it. (2) It slowly turns ugly but in as discrete a manner as possible so that many others will continue to fall for it.

Viruses used to do real damage and present real annoyance to the infected person. Things like cussing at the user, wiping out their hard drive, etc. ... and as a result an entire culture began taking viruses seriously. Nowdays, viruses are discrete and people don't think there's anything wrong because they can't see anything wrong.

I have a shocking suggestion: the fix for this problem is for someone to create an agressive virus twin for each of these not-so-obvious viruses. The agressive twin would do create some real annoyance for the user. Like pop up a dialog box every minute saying "you're infected" until some fix utility was run, at which point everything would be back to normal. Five or six of these agressive, obvious twins and people would wake up and become more careful.

I would suggest one agressive twin for each new infection method. Thus an agressive twin that came in as a password protected zip file, and agressive twin that came in offer nude celebs, etc. etc ...

I would even recommend IT departments release such viruses into their organizations on purpose as teaching tools. I know it sounds like a waste of time but think of all the time it would save later once people started thinking "whew, I'm not going to do that again!"

Am I nuts?


[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/231/25676#25676