General discussion
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Topic
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Closing the door
Locked…after the horse has bolted.
More news about virii this week, or last week, or last month or last year for that matter.
What is wrong, in my humble opinion, is there is a fundamental fault with email per se, that allows virii to be so easily spread using personal address books and suchlike.
We are forever being told to upgrade virus protection, apply security patches and do this, that and the other to protect ourselves from security threats. Perhaps the way electronic communications works should be changed so that functionally virii are no longer an issue. The fault is not the content or the message, but the medium of it’s transmission. Email is NOT secure, and never has been, and perhaps because an email sent from a pc has to be able to be read on an Amiga or a Mac or any other platform this is part of the problem, I don’t know?
I’m not saying I know a solution…far from it. I just think there must be a ‘better way’. Too late to prevent an outbreak after it has struck, and a gram of prevention is worth a kilo of cure, but something has gone seriously wrong if a whole industry is having to spend billions a year on treating and containing and preventing attacks.
I have converted several clients over to non-MS email solutions running on Windows platforms and their incidents of virus attack have dropped to just a few percent of their original levels under Outlook or Outlook Express. Even Eudora lets one slip past every so often, but most of the email trojans or worms seem to be targeted at MS OE or Outlook and Windows address books.
We have to send and receive some extremely secure data electronically, and POP or SMTP mail just doesn’t cut it. We have other methods developed in-house which enable us to communicate via the internet, which are secure from virusses because they use completely non standard transport protocols and can’t even be recognised as email.
Rather than prevent another outbreak, isn’t it time to ‘shoot the messenger’ and replace it with somehing better?