The lowly seer

Botnets overwhelming the net

BBC story . Slight hyperbole, IMHO, but only slight. The problem yet again is Windows's poor security.
If you're going to use it with an internet connection, you owe it to the rest of the world to implement basic security. Use a decent anti-virus package, AVG is one such and free for home use and a firewall, I use Sygate Personal (I think the one that comes with XP is near useless). Spyware detectors are also worthwhile, Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy are the ones I use. Stop using Internet Explorer, which is riddled with security holes and switch to Firefox or Opera.
Better still, if you're geek enough, ditch Windows for Linux (Ubuntu is rather tasty) or, wealthy enough, a Mac with OS X.
Perhaps Vista (sorry but every time I hear the name I can't help but think of packet curries) will plug the security problems but frankly I don't have great hopes, having found a serious nasty in the production release of IE7 - if you have a paragraph or perhaps even a sentence of italicised text, any other text to the right of it usually disappears.
Added to that I'd have to spend a good few quid upgrading my main pc to run it... so thankyou Microsoft, you've finally convinced me to buy a second-hand iMac instead.

posted by Les the Spaceman @ 11:16 pm