Craven BBC avoids naming botnet hosts
By Sam Varghese
Saturday, 14 March 2009 05:24
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But rather than being educational, the 23-minute episode of its technology programme Click, (report here) which often bordered on the sensational, left one major question unanswered: what kind of computers were these - Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD?
If the programme aimed to be educational, and not sensational, then one needed to know this fact above all. It is well-known that a vast majority of the PCs which are commandeered by cyber criminals - people known as crackers, not hackers - run some variant of Windows, with XP being number one.
The programme began this way: "20,000 computers. All hijacked and waiting for instructions. And all under our control." And all spoken by a presenter with a wide-eyed look of impending doom in his eyes.
Fittingly, to watch it online, I needed Windows Media player. A RealPlayer button on the page where one could supposedly choose a media player remained greyed out for me on both Linux and my wife's Windows XP machine. (Update: two hours after I filed this piece, it looks like the RealPlayer link is working.)
There was one mention of the W word on the programme. Quite late in the piece, nearly 20 minutes in, the presenter mentioned that when it came to getting infected by malware from websites - one way of infecting a computer with malicious software that could be used to make it part of a botnet - Windows was the most popular and most vulnerable.
This is a common fallacy - that Windows is the most affected by malware, viruses, worms, adware and spyware because it is the most widely used. The truth is that it is extremely easy to write malicious programs for Windows, and, given the absymal security record it has, incredibly easy to infect computers running this O-S.
But did the Beeb get into these waters? The short answer is no.
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