Comment Devil's advocate (Score 5, Insightful) 733
While I fully agree that the authors of virus/worms etc must be held accountable for their actions, surely there are other parties that are also liable for any issues that arrise from a virus/worm infestation.
The obvious one is the good old Microsoft. This has been beaten to death so many times that I am not going to delve into it...
The other group to consider is the people who have been infected. They have partially brought any problems upon themselves. This happens because of many things including the choice they made to run the system was vulnerable, the choice to not patch promptly (if a patch was available), the choice to not better secure their critical systems, etc.
Blaming the virus/worm authors and the author of the vulnerable software is easy (and absolutely right), but people really need to start looking beyond that and realise that it is really their decisions that are the core issue. If you don't want to be vulnerable to Windows virii/worms then don't run Windows. If you need to run Windows, secure it. If is a critical app, pay some serious attention to it...
Basically, I am advocating a bit of responsibility for ones own destiny...
The obvious one is the good old Microsoft. This has been beaten to death so many times that I am not going to delve into it...
The other group to consider is the people who have been infected. They have partially brought any problems upon themselves. This happens because of many things including the choice they made to run the system was vulnerable, the choice to not patch promptly (if a patch was available), the choice to not better secure their critical systems, etc.
Blaming the virus/worm authors and the author of the vulnerable software is easy (and absolutely right), but people really need to start looking beyond that and realise that it is really their decisions that are the core issue. If you don't want to be vulnerable to Windows virii/worms then don't run Windows. If you need to run Windows, secure it. If is a critical app, pay some serious attention to it...
Basically, I am advocating a bit of responsibility for ones own destiny...
