A number of people responded to my previous article on the BBC’s botnet indicating that I was being overly harsh. I have 2 comments on that:
1. if you’re happy fighting fires, then maybe you should be a fireman
2. most of these respondents ran standalone machines; they had no experience maintaining corporate networks
And that is where a large portion of compromised machines are located. It doesn’t take long for a single virus to cripple a network – see my previous article on viruses in the American and French military networks to see how bad things can be. Whether it’s down to poor system administration or a susceptible platform is irrelevant. Microsoft has created a platform which allows this behaviour to flourish and either refuses to do anything really constructive about it ( they do have an nice ISV environment, don’t they ) or is helpless to fix the base problems.
My argument is why not try something else for a change; you might end up being more productive and enjoying it at the same time. Give MacOSx or Linux a chance – you could be pleasantly surprised.