YOU have to hand it to the author. It was a superb ruse. Not since
Shakespeare, has anyone so eloquently conveyed the power of love. Millions of
lonely people round the world clicked on the Love Bug e-mail attachment, craving
affection. And, as the Bard noted, 鈥淭he course of true love never did run
蝉尘辞辞迟丑.鈥�
A week later, the world is counting the cost of its brief encounter with the
virus. Estimates run at up to $4.4 billion. And this for what computer
pundits consider a relatively innocuous bug.
Viruses, we know, are here to stay. Yet we are still so vulnerable. We need
to urgently rethink our attitudes to computer security, especially as
individuals and companies use the Internet more for commerce. The Love Bug made
no secret of sending passwords to an address in the Philippines. But what if a
virus removed your encryption keys or credit card numbers without you
knowing?
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The Love Bug, like so many earlier viruses, mainly infected machines running
software from Microsoft. In recent years, Bill Gates and co have aimed, above
all, for interactivity between programs within a PC, and between PCs and the
Web. Unrestricted interactivity is great fun, but it leaves machines open to
abuse.
Microsoft insists that its customers want interactivity. But if you use
Microsoft鈥檚 Outlook e-mailer, are you happy that it can contact everyone on your
mailing list without your knowledge? The Love Bug was written in Visual Basic, a
language that can be used to reprogram PCs. A simple message warning of this
possibility before a VB program runs could have made all the difference. It
would have made many of the lovelorn stop and think.
Another question: why don鈥檛 new PCs come with antiviral protection built in,
or at least in the software bundle that comes with a new machine? It鈥檚 true that
these programs won鈥檛 stop every new virus, but they are getting better. Some
stop viruses they鈥檝e never seen before by applying simple rules to search for
code that resembles that used by virus writers.
Microsoft and computer suppliers need to sharpen up. British security expert
Caspar Bowden likens computer companies to American car makers of the 1960s,
before Ralph Nader pointed out that many models were death traps. At that time,
car makers argued that the public were not interested in safety. But Nader鈥檚
book Unsafe at Any Speed created a stir that eventually raised safety
standards.
It鈥檚 time to start demanding better security. Consumers need to push back.
There are alternatives: Apple Mac and Unix have reputations for better security
controls than Windows. Nothing will change while we continue to tolerate lax
security. And next time a virus strikes, the cost could be much, much higher
than it was this time.
