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Malware Pulls an "Italian Job"
A number of readers sent us word about a malware attack that has been underway since Saturday that began with the compromise of more than 1,100 mostly Italian Web sites. Websense claims that more than 10,000 sites have been infected by now, 80% of them in Italy. There are indications that most of the Italian sites are resident at the same large Italian hosting provider. Trend Micro reports on the attack, which is launched from a malicious Iframe tag inserted into pages on compromised sites. For visitors to these sites, this begins a cascade of "drive-by" malware downloads if one of several targeted vulnerabilities is available and unpatched. The first page to which visitors are redirected by the Iframe hosts a recent version of Mpack attack software. Panda has a month-old report on Mpack (PDF) that provides copious detail about its nefarious ways.
you're right to an extent, but still, if you are a site owner, and if your site is making money for you (or if you are a site user, and are delivering benefits from the said site) little would you care if you're co-hosted or not. the days when putting up a site meant l33t skillz and buying a server seem long gone. the fact that sites are hosted on one server (and it may be a big server) doesn't make the problem smaller to the owners and the users.
and, incidentally, imho software companies should be liable for trouble created by their software as the hosting companies are.
and, incidentally, imho software companies should be liable for trouble created by their software as the hosting companies are.
Never will happen.
The software vendors cannot control what 3rd party software run with their software -- not even a pure 'monoculture' PC from the OS up.
Hence the usual longwinded boilerplate EULAs that REALLY only say 3 things:
1) Do redistribute our software.
2) Do not reverse engineer our software.
3) This software is "AS IS". Use it at your own risk. We are not responsible for anything that happens to your compuer when you use our software.
Insightful my ass...
:P
The day your favorite OS dominates the market, it'll be pwned, don't you worry. And I say this as 1) a Firefox fan, hoping that it never gets to be the majority browser for precisely that reason, and 2) a fan of all the OS's. I use Windows for my desktops, Linux for my servers, and Mac sometimes to play. They all have fans, and I don't feel the need to belittle any of them to make one of the others look better. It doesn't work that way.
Hope I don't get modded down - I'm not so much flaming as ANTI-trolling if you catch what I"m trying to say. heh.
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
Disclaimer: I am neither a Windows fan nor an Mac hater. I use Windows *nix almost equally.
Everytime some vulnerability is found, someone shouts about not using Windows, especially these Apple lovers. Come on guys, can we stop this? These so called malwares target novice users, not Slashdot users. Tell me a single alternative your mom can use and I will take it. The so called alternatives are either too_expensive (suggest your mom to shell out 2K on Mac just_to_get_on_internet) or too_not_userfriendly. Why not stop beating the drum on Windows?
"The day your favorite OS dominates the market, it'll be pwned, don't you worry."
If market share is any indication to being pwned; then why isn't Apache attacked more that IIS? According to Netcraft Apache has 53.76% of the market compared to MS: 31.83%
And I say this as 1) a Firefox fan, hoping that it never gets to be the majority browser for precisely that reason, and
I personally only want FF have enough of the market; just enough to make companies follow the web standards: IE not catering to only one browser. Actually, the same applies to ODF; just enough to make companies not require a specific Office Suite.
"2) a fan of all the OS's. I use Windows for my desktops, Linux for my servers, and Mac sometimes to play."
Use what ever works for you.
Even simplier:
You don't know what you don't know.
There are many web hosting companies and some of them negate their responsibility to Internet users at large.
The web hosting industry does not get much attention from free software developers. This is broadly because they want to insist that anything they spend money on develping not be usable by their competition. As such, no company (under the terms of the GPL) may make any developer sign any kind of non disclosure agreement for the purposes of receiving GPL code.
The web hosting industry is stuck in a rut of its own design. It uses software that it can't modify to meet its real security needs because nothing exists free that has all of the working features that their customers demand.
This is the problem, this will continue to be the problem for quite some time. Even if a free control panel and billing system were realsed that they find suitable it would only be after perhaps a couple years of development and testing.
Sad, but true. The industry is making us all a victim of its success. It sells the use of GNU/Linux computers pocketing all profits and only giving back to companies that produce software that is not free.. totally against the tit-for-tat that made it such a lucrative market to begin with.
You're right, but you left out some stuff.