Dan Greer's Monoculture Bomb Goes Off
,----[ Quoye ]
| Andy Updegrove writes "Three years ago, celebrated security expert Dan
| Geer lost his job at @stake when he co-authored a paper on the dangers
| that the Microsoft 'monoculture' represented for end-users. Last fall,
| he authored a similar warning in a Perspective piece he wrote for
| CNETNews.com, applauding the action of Massachusetts in adopting
| OpenDocument Format, thereby reducing its vulnerability to the same type
| of risk. Four days ago, Dan's prediction came true, when users of Word
| (but not those that only trade files created in StarOffice, OpenOffice, or
| other ODF compliant software) began to be infected with the Backdoor.Ginwui
| virus - a malicious Trojan program that hitches a ride on bogus Word
| documents. In short, an object lesson that in IT, as in biology, those
| that exist in diverse gene pools are at a lower risk, both individually
| and collectively, from those that subsist in a proprietary monoculture."
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http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/24/0238224&from=rss
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