Thursday, April 14, 2005

blogs are dangerous?... wtf?!

well, it looks like some tool over at the bbc thought it would be a good idea to report on how blogs were increasingly being used as a way to get malware onto the computers of people who visit those sites... what this person missed entirely was that blogs are just web pages and the threats they pose are exactly the same as for any other type of website... these are just web threats, web threats of one kind or another have been around for years, there's nothing new here and blogs don't pose any threats that are specific to just blogs...

what really struck me, though was how Viruslist.com picked up on the story and did nothing but parrot the message that blogs pose a threat... they could have set the record straight, they could have explained that these are just the same old threats in the same old medium (the world wide web), but apparently it's more important for them to use this opportunity to urge readers to use anti-virus software (and look at the pretty product placement at the bottom of the page)...

let's be perfectly clear here, web based security threats are not new and packaging them as though they're blog based security threats and are new effectively creates Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt... the bbc news drone i can forgive for simply being ignorant, but Viruslist.com is part of kaspersky labs so they really should have known better...