AS ILLUSTRATED IN two earlier posts, Microsoft is working very hard at the moment to shift blame from its incompetence onto users (victims) and Trojan/virus/malware authors (those who exploit Microsoft's poor engineering). We wrote about more extensively this in recent days, namely under:

• Leave Microsoft Alone
• Never Blame Microsoft, Blame Users and Exploits

Sam Varghese has a similar explanation. He suggests that the Conficker worm has become a PR problem.

In other words, bad man make worm, good company willing to spend tons of money to catch bad man. Naughty man must go to jail. Plays wonderfully well with the public, especially in the US of A. If you leave your front door wide open, the man who steals from you is the one to be blamed. You are certainly not responsible.

Add to this a conga line of self-serving anti-virus vendors, who love to use the worm to drum up fear (and, incidentally, sales) by externalising the fault.

Where does it leave Average Joe? Well, not in a very comforting position, that's for sure. Also in the news this week:

i. Microsoft's CAPTCHA revolutions busted by spammers - again and again

Spammers have once again ramped up the siege on Microsoft's Live Hotmail services, by busting Microsoft's latest, redesigned CAPTCHA system.

ii. Does Microsoft's Patch Tuesday Need Fixing?

In December, for example, Microsoft was forced to release an emergency, out-of-cycle patch for Internet Explorer (IE) to close a security hole that allowed attackers to infect more than 2 million machines. The malware allowed the bad guys to steal such personal data as passwords when the user visited one of at least 10,000 compromised websites.

iii. Many Brits Too Scared to Shop Online

Over 40 percent of Brits refuse to shop online because they are concerned about security, says CyberSource.

Microsoft may have rendered on-line banking and shopping "dangerous". UNIX/Linux don't have this problem, so maybe it's time for all to consider migrating to GNU/Linux. Freedom will come along with security. ⬆