Wednesday, June 02, 2004

In my Opinion

Security risks and threats are everywhere in every platform every network Never the less it’s as much responsibility of the user of a system as much it is of the developer in keeping a system secure. How many people even bother enabling the auto update feature or install any service packs of all the 100% of people using internet excluding the dev community, I would bet a majority still doesn’t use a firewall, if you ask why you don’t have firewall installed ?, answers would SHOCK YOU ( well it did to me ) here the response of a guy who gets firewalls and antivirus updates in cd’s like Digit, M@gnet ( he doesn’t subscribe to Developer IQ because it has less games ) and never bother even installing them.“ well I heard they are not 100% reliable ” ever heard or the term basic security Many of us don’t even bother update our antivirus or install service packs ??? and when our systems crash we blame the product, I see people wasting time over chatting would even try to update their Antivirus why again a SHOCK “ it eats bandwidth you know ”. Many educational institutes, from schools ( claiming computer education ) to engineering colleges have great labs or so they claim, not even have a free ANTI VIRUS packages and those who do, don't ever update them.

Another twisted tale is you get on to a system of any student ( or call him an aspiring young hacker ) he would have everything loads of cracks and even virus source codes from various sites but wouldn't have updates to his antivirus pack or neither would he ever bother.

Shifting back, No developer / firm would like their software to have Bugs or Vulnerabilities because they cant risk the competition and even if there’s a bug or any news is out about a software ( people still talk and talk and talk ) but they even don’t bother installing a patch that gets immediately Released to fix the bug. And they still talk “ oh that’s old news it seems it got fixed ” who’s going to fix yours. When it comes to free software (spyware) like KAZAA users stick on to it like glue and they never even bother or worry, even if it headlines the NEWS saying its a SPYWARE BEWARE !!!

Well it’s our negligence that hackers cash ! bugs are out and no sooner even patches are out and we don’t even bother installing them
if we as users do our part of keeping our own systems secure it would itself mount to a scope where the wide spread of viruses and worms can be limited in turn be helping ourselves rite…

Ending note “ Negligence is more dangerous than Ignorance ”

3 comments:

Sudhakar said...

Absolutely True, excellent post umesh...Keep it up...!

Lakshminarayanan Sampath said...

Umesh,
Could you list free ANTI VIRUS packages that i can download from the net and install on windows 2k system?
Thanks,
Laxmi

Umesh Thota said...

there are many free antivirus packs available
most popular wud be AVG and AVAST
i had both on my win2000 system before, they worked just fine

here's the download link for them :

AVG
http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_index.htm

Avast
http://www.avast.com/
it has a screen saver scanner too ;)

ther are many others too like AntiVir Personal Edition ( http://www.free-av.com )

Gud Luck ;)
Umesh