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 COLUMN
Hold the hype I DON'T KNOW about you, but I'm tired of reading in industry journals about how awful it is that anti-virus vendors try to drum up hype whenever there's a new virus. To read some of the stuff cropping up across the Web, you'd think that anti-virus software is a complete scam along the lines of extended warranties or rustproofing undercoats.
I've found that my colleagues on the news desks of magazines I've written for also do a good job of putting virus outbreaks into proper perspective. Occasionally, though, we do make the mistake of forgetting that our sources don't have a perfect view of the future. The cracks in our sources' crystal balls came up again a few weeks ago when press reports of the "chunked-encoding" vulnerabilities in the Apache Web server quoted a security guru -- who shall go nameless because he doesn't need any more roasted crow sandwiches -- saying, in effect, that because there weren't any known exploits, the bugs weren't that serious for now. If I'm not mistaken, someone posted a tool making use of the exploits within 48 hours after that statement hit the Web, once again demonstrating how quickly the future becomes now. Of course, there are some who think we can have it both ways. If you believe them, we're guilty of ignoring "unfashionable" viruses, such as Klez, while at the same time paying too much attention to the JPEG proof-of-concept worm that turned up last month. I can't blame anyone for being as confused as I am over this attitude. So who's to blame for virus hype? My vote goes to mainstream media: your local newspaper and television news. After all, when you have to completely refresh your content every day, a slow news day means that material ordinarily buried in the furniture advertisements winds up on the front page -- or in TV terms, gets teased all the way through prime time. For some reporters, it's just easier to recycle the multitude of vendor press releases than to actually explain to readers and viewers why this particular virus is not simply crying "wolf!" It's summer here in California, and the most popular public service announcements are exhorting us to save power. It seems to me that it's time for some PSAs on basic computer security, in between baseball games. Why should corporate IT care about consumer computer security? Because end-users are always the weakest link -- and that's reality, hold the hype. P.J. Connolly (pj_connolly@infoworld.com) covers collaboration and security for the InfoWorld Test Center.  RELATED SUBJECTS  SecurityMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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