This morning’s Washington Post has a well-written article that includes a couple of chilling predictions: Fight Against Viruses May Move to Servers (TechNews.com).
The article quotes Brian King, an Internet security analyst with the government-funded CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, as saying: “Users may not realize that just having anti-virus software and a firewall isn’t enough to protect them anymore.”
Virus writers are getting more clever, and the gap is narrowing between the time vulnerabilities are discovered and exploits are launched. It is no longer realistic to expect ordinary users to be completely responsible for every aspect of security. ISPs and those companies that manage the Internet backbone need to take a much stronger role in blocking dangerous or hostile traffic before it has a chance to reach critical mass.
If your ISP is allowing dozens or hundreds of virus-infected messages to land in your mailbox, maybe you should be asking them why they don’t eliminate those dangerous messages at the server?
Ed Bott 