Yet another virus, being spread around the world by e-mail, is again proving the ability of any one person or a small groups of people to create massive damage to our modern systems. The virus, known as "Bugbear" is perhaps the cleverest so far. Analysts are predicting it will outdo Klez.H which this May was infecting one in every three hundred e-mail messages.
Computer viruses are at best frustrating and time-consuming and at worst, where they corrupt or eradicate data held on hard disks, can cause considerable loss of revenue to businesses. Large corporations can afford the investment in mail-screening facilities, often run by independent companies. For the great majority of the world’s businesses, such an expense is not a realistic option. Reliance is, therefore, placed on standard commercial prophylactics, such as Norton Utilities which do not, necessarily, give sufficient protection when a new virus strikes.
The whole subject of viruses throws up two important questions. The first is the mindset of the individuals that perpetrate these hugely damaging programs. They are often found to be computer "nerds" who decided on this criminality because they wanted to prove to themselves and maybe to a few misdirected friends, that they could cause massive disruption around the world. In essence, writing a virus is not difficult. Indeed, given that hacker sites often carry the code of old viruses, even semi computer-literate criminals can set off their own little e-mail nasty.
"Bugbear" is more imaginative than many, in that it picks up old messages from an infected computer and sends them out to everyone in an address book. It also creates phony but official looking return addresses, very often using governmental or academic domain names. It also has a worm which will allow someone to hack into a computer and access confidential data. In addition, it seems to be able to pick up other latent viruses and forward them, which is an alarming innovation, since in the past, one of the defining characteristics of a virus tended to be its uniform file size. However, perhaps the more important question is how can e-mail programs permit this abuse in the first place? The majority of virus attacks is, of course, aimed at computers using Microsoft operating systems and mailer programs, since Microsoft is the dominant player. Apple Macintosh computers and systems running UNIX are currently almost never affected by viruses.
Time and again, we hear that a new virus has exploited poor coding in a Microsoft email program. This is surely a scandal on the part of one of the world’s wealthiest companies. Is it not about time that Microsoft closed the loopholes in its programs, which criminal hackers use to disrupt e-mail communications worldwide? Is it beyond the wit of the thousands of programmers employed by the company to clean up their software-coding act, and also build into programs security devices? At a most elementary level, if a mail is about to be sent to everyone or a significant number of people in an e-mail address book, could not the program ask the user for confirmation and perhaps a password?
Microsoft’s failure to get produce remedies is surely going to prompt legal action from millions of disgruntled users.
