I don’t know if anyone else is picking up on this, but computer viruses are increasingly becoming a class issue. An article in today’s newspaper revealed that the author of the Mydoom virus which is now racing around the net deliberately chose to target home users rather than corporate, government or military users.<\/p>\n
\nHome users are ‘soft targets’ for virus writers. They often barely understand the computer that they have purchased. They use whatever software came with it. If the computer comes with Outlook Express, they use Outlook Express. If Outlook Express turns out to be a highly efficient virus delivery agent that also sends and receives email, well then, nothing to be done.
\nTell your average home user that they should change their email program over to something else (like the excellent Mozilla Thunderbird) and get ready for the blank stare.
\nAnd then there’s anti-virus software. Buy a new computer and you will probably get something installed with it. But if you don’t pay to renew the license, you don’t get protection. And if you don’t update the virus lists, you’re not protected.
\nHome users suffer both a lack of funds and a lack of knowledge and they are increasingly the intended target of malicious attacks like Mydoom.
\nThey are also, increasingly, working class people. The very rich will have the latest and best anti-virus software on their machines. They will be accessing the net through secure corporate networks, behind firewalls, and will rarely be exposed to problems. And if they do have a problem, they simply ring up the folks in the IT department who will come and fix it.
\nWith help lines costing as much as <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t know if anyone else is picking up on this, but computer viruses are increasingly becoming a class issue. An article in today’s newspaper revealed that the author of the Mydoom virus which is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-exclusive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}