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Thomas, et al:
Spreading FUD doesn't help explain the reality of the threat.
There is in fact risk of quick and cost-prohibitive-to-reverse loss of data stored on many existing hard drives, and few home PC users are aware of this fact, with many companies and IT professionals equally ignorant.
There has always been essentially this same risk. Despite this, worms have not been spread that destroy the host, but they were at all times and with all worms imminently possible. There are two schools of thought on this, as far as I can tell. One school says that it would be counterproductive to the worm author's aim if the box were completely destroyed, because then it couldn't infect other boxes. The other school says that the only reason the whole world hasn't been destroyed by now is that nobody, not even malicious bad guys, want to destroy the world. After all, they too have to live in it.
Whatever the reason, the risks of the past have not warranted proactive defenses, and the market has not demanded secure computer systems so it hasn't purchased such devices, despite the fact that they do exist.
Thomas, your intent to spread awareness is acknowledged.
Understand that you are talking to the engineering persons who build the products and you are making political and socioeconomic arguments of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
If you have a technical recommendation or a proposal for engineering decisions, please feel free to make it. You are encouraged to make such recommendations.
But don't expect much if your only recommendation is that all the idiots who built the flawed products should immediately resign and refuse to apply their skill in the service of evil corporations who are willfully negligent and create defective products that hurt people on purpose.
That's arguably the case, but everyone knows this, and so everyone is able to defend themselves by making good product purchase decisions.
Sincerely,
Jason Coombs [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Thomas Jansen wrote:
Curtis Stevens wrote:
A non-aware BIOS won't issue the freeze command. I can't set a password either. You are right if the BIOS supports the pasword it will also freeze lock.Thomas
If the system is smart enough to issue the password, then it should
be smart enough to FREEZE LOCK the drive as well. 10 years ago, the
According to the CT a German originated magazine a small test showed 2/3 of the systems did NOT freeze lock.
internet did exist, and browsers were much more broken then they are now.Do you really believe browsers are more protected? Never heard of Browser Hijacking I guess. About the antivirus software you are true.
One of the big differences between now and then is that anti-virus software
has become wildly popular.
But look at the percentage using them and the ones who keep it up to date. It will take some time to detect the new worm and worms tend to mutate very often
Sincerely, Thomas
