We kept rereading Larry Blasko’s piece regarding the MSBlast worm and the importance of applying patches because he seems to be lumping Apple Macintosh in with Windows PC’s as if both platforms are somehow equally affected by the worm. We couldn’t quite believe it or thought perhaps we were being paranoid. What do you think?
Blasko writes, “In this case, the virus-like worm is called LovSan, Msblast or Posa. You don’t have to do anything in particular to get it, just be connected to the Internet. And it’s supposed to be poised to strike Microsoft’s software update Web site, crippling it, and probably the Internet, when hundreds of thousands of home computers all try to visit the site at once.”
Okay, so far, but it would have been far clearer and very simple to stipulate that it’s only Windows “home computers” that are affected and not Macs – especially in light of this section of Blasko’s piece:
“…when Microsoft or Apple or any other competent authority says there’s a security flaw and here’s the fix, take the fix. The dufi (plural of dufus) who are having problems are having them because they were too dumb or too busy to take preventive measures.”
Good advice, but does that read to you as an attempt to include the Mac platform into the MSBlast worm plague along with Windows? Ordinarily, maybe it wouldn’t read that way, but Blasko fails to mention that the MSBlast worm does not affect Macintosh when, again, it would have been very easy to do so.
Also of interest is Balsko’s attempt to trivialize the MSBlast worm, “…in August not a lot usually happens, but newsprint and airtime still need to be filled, so there’s a tendency to take an annoyance and exaggerate it to a national emergency.” Last week The Mercury News reported that the MSBlast worm had affected “as many as 1.4 million computers worldwide” and “could take weeks [to clean up] and cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity.”
MacDailyNews is left wondering why Blasko wrote the article the way he did and we can’t help thinking that the casual reader would read that article and come away with the impression that all personal computers (Windows, Linux, Macs, etc.) were affected by MSBlast when, in reality, only Windows personal computers suffered from MSBlast.
Blasko’s full Associated Press article, “PC users must keep tabs on patches” is here.
From Symantec info on the vs 9:
“it automatically removes viruses from email attachments, Internet downloads, and other sources�without interrupting your work. Now it also finds and removes PC viruses to ensure that you don�t spread infections to friends and colleagues.”
Note the: “Now it also finds PC viruses”.
AS we all here said: be happy. You received via email a worm. So what, your Mac G4 is not affected. Be safe. Your IT simply wants you not to contribute to the spread.
Macs may be – to use a medical term – asymptomatic hosts of Micros**t viruses/worms. You may get it: it does nothing to you (asymptomatic) but you may become contagious and the person you infect might even die from something you do not even notice to have as it does zero harm to your system.