Can the Malware Industry be Trusted?

Joe Barr writes "Is the entire anti-virus / malware industry as rotten as it appears? I started digging into it as a result of the recent lame, unsubstantiated assertions of viral threats to Linux by Kaspersky Lab, but the practice doesn't seem to start or end with them. Who knows, maybe it's pandemic in that entire segment of the IT industry."

Comments

Mod parent up, please.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Yagu makes a good point...being in the IT industry, sometimes we mistakenly perceive things as being blindingly obvious, when in point of fact, it's still quite a mystery to the layman. Characterizing Joe Sixpack as a 'stupid dolt' equates ignorance with stupidity, which is fallacious and counterproductive.

Obviously, the 'stupid dolts' are smart enough to draw conclusions based upon the available intel they have access to...the real problem is that, as the author correctly pointed out, the lies are repeated until they become the truth. GIGO, and all that jazz.

There's no cure for stupidity, but there is a cure for ignorance: education. If we want to fight this FUD, we need to do it by teaching the truth, rather thn dismissing the vast majority of users as 'stupid dolts'. When we do that, we play right into the hands of the malware companies.