Slashdot Mirror
Virus Eats School District's Homework
theodp writes "Forget about 'snow days' — the kids in the Lake Washington School District could probably use a few 'virus days.' Laptops issued to each student in grades 6-12 were supposed to accelerate learning ('Schools that piloted the laptops found that students stayed engaged nad [sic] organized whiel [sic] boosting creativity,' according to the district's Success Stories), but GeekWire reports that a computer virus caused havoc for the district as it worked its way through the Windows 7 computers, disrupting class and costing the district money — five temporary IT staff members were hired to help contain the virus. Among the reasons cited for the school district's choice of PCs over Macs were the proximity to Microsoft HQ (Redmond is in the district), Microsoft's involvement in supporting local and national education, and last but not least, cost. In the past, the Lake Washington School District served as a Poster Child of sorts for Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group."
Among the reasons cited for the school district's choice of PCs over Mac's were (...) cost.
And yet Linux was never an option? Avoided Apple to reduce the cost and ended up hiring 5 people to contain the damage that came as a consequence of their choice... way to go!
Among other things, TFA implies that this is because they were using 'PCs instead of Macs' [sic].
While it's true that OSX has way less malware than Windows, the main cause of malware infections is the users who click anything that's offered to them without thinking.
You can hide behind less popular operating systems, but the sad truth is that the average computer user simply can't handle the freedom of being able to do whatever they want, without messing things up.
So the solution is better tech education or--the cheaper way--locking things down. Both MS and Apple are doing it in their mobile OSs and they're starting to implement this in their desktop OSs as well.
Of course, the IT could also have locked Windows down with Group Policy and SRP, so that it would be pretty much impossible to install anything (unless reinstalling the OS).
Instead, they relied on some crappy antivirus (Sophos) and I wouldn't be surprised if the users were given admin rights as well.
I'm not a Microsoft fan at all (and they might have played dirty to get the school to use Windows), but the real story here is IT staff incompetence and the poor education of the average computer user.
The broken Windows fallacy?
. These days almost every single exploit that hits a windows box uses a cross platform plugin.
Windows, with the history it has, has a number of highly sophisticated tools at detecting them; and Macs do not, and it is thus likely that any such infections would be completely unnoticed?
These are what is known as hypotheses. The problem is, there are a crap-ton of security researchers who actually look at these numbers, and both have been disproved. Most malware still doesn't have a cross platform component, either by numbers of infection or by variant. The infection rate of a random sampling of Macs inspected by security experts always finds a much lower infection rate by a huge margin.
Maybe to help explain this phenomenon you should wander over to a security convention like Blackhat or Defcon. Count the number of security experts with Macbooks versus other devices. Notice a trend?