Conficker worm has become a PR problem

Sam Varghese
Monday, 16 February 2009 07:01

IT Industry - Market

Anyone who follows the technology industry would find it easy to pinpoint the stage at which a company realises that it has a problem it cannot handle, throws in the towel and starts to treat said problem as a PR issue.
The Conficker worm, the latest of a thousand or more serious security threats to the operating system known as Windows, is the latest case in point.

When Microsoft offered a bounty, it became evident that the company had decided that the damage needed to be contained - not the damage wrought by the worm, the damage inflicted on its already mouldy public image.

In other words, bad man make worm, good company willing to spend tons of money to catch bad man. Naughty man must go to jail. Plays wonderfully well with the public, especially in the US of A. If you leave your front door wide open, the man who steals from you is the one to be blamed. You are certainly not responsible.

Add to this a conga line of self-serving anti-virus vendors, who love to use the worm to drum up fear (and, incidentally, sales) by externalising the fault.

Which one of these companies has the courage to come out and call Microsoft on its security practices?

A large number of media outlets which give credence to Microsoft's PR don't do the situation much good either.

Unfortunately, even us Linux users are touched by problems like this. Yesterday I had to advise a sibling in the UK how to go about cleaning out the worm.

One of the plaintive questions raised by this member of my family was: "Why can't they (Microsoft) have some web pages where they explain things in a simple manner so that people who know English can understand? The way it is done, it looks like it is for some kind of exclusive club."

The infected PC runs a licensed copy of Windows and is set to update automatically. It was reformatted last October due to a worm infection.

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