Sure enough.. Re: virus. A threat to your PC or licence to print money?
By Anthony Browne
timesonline.co.uk
COMPUTER software companies have been accused of failing to stamp out viruses because they make so much money selling programmes to combat them.
Companies that sell antivirus programmes were also accused of choosing catchy names for the viruses, so they get more publicity.
The row, which reflects the millennium bug furore, when computer experts were accused of hyping the problem to generate work, has erupted after the SoBig.F virus was declared the biggest ever, with e-mail inboxes clogged up around the world. The internet provider AOL said it had stopped more than 23 million copies of the virus.
BT, Britain’s biggest phone company, was yesterday warning internet service providers that its fast internet broadband network was “suffering intermittent degradation of service” because of the extra traffic the virus had generated.
Yesterday Nick Scales, chief executive of software company Avecho, which also makes anti-virus programmes, said the industry had a vested commercial interest in letting the virus attacks continue: “It’s complacent, silly and I’d even go so far as to say there is a cartel there. There is a triangle between the virus writers who get the kudos, the anti-virus software companies and the technical writers who write about it.”
The commercial director of Avecho, Simon Copeland, said that people in other anti-virus companies had told him they chose deliberately provocative names in order to get publicity. “They think its not bad to get some publicity because it scares everyone into buying their product.”
But the claims were denied by other software companies. Simon Conant, of Microsoft, said: “That’s like saying that fire departments want fires.” |
