To everyone who says that the solution is to tell people not to open unknown attachments, maybe there is more to the problem/solution than that... I found the name of the vbs file to be probably the best-engineered part of the virus... Assume that one of your relatives or a trusted friend gets infected, and you happen to receive a note called I-LOVE-YOU. Your first impulse is to open it and see what the 'trusted' party sent to you... Everyone who uses outlook is likely to have some close friends in their address book, so this scenario is not unlikely to happen. I feel like the blanket solution of making fun of people who open email attachments won't help, for the same reason as telling children not to talk to strangers is ineffective. The child's image of a stranger is not at all what it should be for the child's safety. Most users are not trained to look at the extension of a file (some even have those extensions turned off), but none will hesitate to try to judge the contents by the main name or icon. Perhaps a better fix to this kind of problem would be better grouping of icons for security. Anything that stands a chance of getting run on a system should perhaps be assigned a more dangerous-looking icon. Also, perhaps the use of file permissions, and setting all incoming file attachments as read-only, non-executable (like you can do in *nix) would help.
I read a book in middle school called The Wave, ironically enough. It described a school in which one of the teachers did almost exactly what WAVE is proposing, set up a system of "guidelines," and ended up turning the whole school into a Fascist state before he shocked the students into recognition of what they had become. It's actually based on an actual incident, too. This is a 6th grade level book, I don't think it takes a geek to understand what's wrong with this system.
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To everyone who says that the solution is to tell people not to open unknown attachments, maybe there is more to the problem/solution than that... I found the name of the vbs file to be probably the best-engineered part of the virus... Assume that one of your relatives or a trusted friend gets infected, and you happen to receive a note called I-LOVE-YOU. Your first impulse is to open it and see what the 'trusted' party sent to you... Everyone who uses outlook is likely to have some close friends in their address book, so this scenario is not unlikely to happen. I feel like the blanket solution of making fun of people who open email attachments won't help, for the same reason as telling children not to talk to strangers is ineffective. The child's image of a stranger is not at all what it should be for the child's safety. Most users are not trained to look at the extension of a file (some even have those extensions turned off), but none will hesitate to try to judge the contents by the main name or icon. Perhaps a better fix to this kind of problem would be better grouping of icons for security. Anything that stands a chance of getting run on a system should perhaps be assigned a more dangerous-looking icon. Also, perhaps the use of file permissions, and setting all incoming file attachments as read-only, non-executable (like you can do in *nix) would help.
I read a book in middle school called The Wave, ironically enough. It described a school in which one of the teachers did almost exactly what WAVE is proposing, set up a system of "guidelines," and ended up turning the whole school into a Fascist state before he shocked the students into recognition of what they had become. It's actually based on an actual incident, too. This is a 6th grade level book, I don't think it takes a geek to understand what's wrong with this system.