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Virus triggers suit against Microsoft
Posted by Raul Ruiz on Wednesday, February 05 @ 13:00:54 EST
Contributed by Anonymous
Consumers
Anonymous writes "A Korean civic group plans to file a lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. over the computer worm attack that crippled the nation's Internet activity last month.

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A relatively begnin worm (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, February 06 @ 05:45:11 EST
Three comments: First, technically it was a worm not a virus, and a relatively begnin worm [www.caida.org] at that. It left no lasting damage, not even writing itself to the hard disk, and could be removed by shutting down the infected Windows machine. Lucky. Despite shutting down parts of the Internet, the worm was limited to a small number of machines because Microsoft has boxed themselves in because the MS-SQL Server doesn't run on non-Windows platforms. Second, this raises the question, again, of leveraging a monopoly. Microsoft's SQL Server has been playing catch-up with its rivals for years [www.informationweek.com] and cannot compete on stability, scalability, security [www.cnn.com] or TCO. However, despite this, Microsoft has been bundling MS-SQL Server [techupdate.zdnet.co.uk], security holes and all. Thus, many that were struck with the worm, may not have known they were vulnerable, even if they had read of the patch as a harmful side effect of bundling an unnecessary/unwanted product. Last, of those that knew of the patch, obviously few have applied it. Historically, Microsoft's patches are notorious for breaking exisiting applications, especially third party applications, and/or failing to fix the problem they claim to address, and/or introducing new security problems. However, even Microsoft's own system administrators elected not to apply the patch to production machines [news.com.com] until after they were hit. Historically, spinmeisters have tried to shift the blame to the sysadmins in way that runs counter to the "easy to run and maintain" sales pitch, which may turn out to be false advertising.


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