As I was watching the news on TV today, they had this very new and exciting fact : viruses are spreading rapidly amongst Belgian e-mail systems and users.
They claimed that it all was due to an ongoing war between virus creators, causing a new virus to appear every 20 minutes instead of every 2 hours last year. 4 out of 10 e-mail are infected according to BIPT (Belgian Institute for Postal services and Telecommunication), and when taking spam into account, 80% of all mail traffic is a waste of time and bandwidth.
Where in the first half of 2003 nearly 500.000 computers were infected with one or more viruses, the first half of the year 2004 shows 2.4 million infected machines.
I'm sorry to bring you this new, but the ongoing war of virus creators is not the cause of this all. The constant influx of idiots on the internet is. Everyone should be online, everyone should be connected permanently (either with DSL or cable access) and blah blah blah. The internet is not for someone who just sits around behind his desk, opening every mail they get, downloading executables and files from unknown servers or entering creditcard details on the website because a mail stating :
"We UR bank, and accont verrification is need ed. Pleeze enter ur details and pincode on our webside :
http://www.namefsomebank.ru@giveusyourmoney-fool%%youareanIDIOT
Tank U."
told them to do so. Those people fucking deserve to get their machines infected. common sense is the first line of defense against viruses, scams, phising and trojans. Secondly comes staying up to date on patches, anti-virus software, firewall and the use of alternative programs (browser, newsclient, mailprogram, instant messenger etc).
Until people get that into their thick skulls, we'll see the amount of infections and spam rise exponentially over the next couple of months - and there is no reason to yell "but that won't affect me!" because as long as the idiots remain online and keep doing what they do, your well protected mailbox will keep on being flooded with spam, viruses, spoofs, bounces and complaints from people that claim you infected them.
I am well aware that not everyone is capable, nor interested to properly read and analyse the header of a mail they received, but please... if you don't know what you're doing, get the fuck off again. And please - don't make babies.
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