Reply #10: That's not entirely Microsoft's fault..... [View All]

[Liberal Veteran]

The inbox being flooded due to the sobig virus is because after all these years, people still don't follow the basics lessons of email security (namely opening up unsolicited attachment).

I am not a big fan of Microsoft's either, but the fact is that even Microsoft cannot protect users from their own stupidity. Unlike the blaster virus which actually DID exploit an open hole in the OS (that had a security patch a month earlier that many failed to patch), the majority of email viruses are the direct result of people who just never learn the lessons of the last 5 zillion viruses they recieved. I can't tell you the number of times I had to remove the happy99 virus from machines (and still do even though the virus has been around for 4 years now) from people who will open any attachment they get without a second thought.

It's a no win situation with these email viruses for Microsoft. Every attempt they make to help protect the customer from email viruses (such as alerts to let you know something is trying to send email automatically which is a common trick of these viruses, blocking known insecure file attachments with extensions that commonly contain a virus, or preventing a customer from running an attachment without saving it to disk first) is met with a flood of calls from customers complaining and wanting to disable the feature because it annoys them. These are the same people that end up being the ones that open the "neat screensaver" attachment that contains a virus and end up flooding your inbox with virus spam because they have you in their address book.