No Change Allowed

Last week I sent the following out to the Computer Science faculty and suggested that they use Mozilla or Firefox:

According to this article in the Washington Post at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/
A6746-2004Jun25.html

"the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the Department of Homeland Security...recommends that Explorer users consider other browsers that are not affected by the attack, such as Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Opera. Mac, Linux and other non-Windows operating systems are immune from this attack. For people who continue to use the Internet Explorer, CERT and Microsoft recommend setting the browser's security settings to "high," but that can impair some browsing functions."

I was contacted by the security people at our computer center and was informed that our virus protection software would protect everyone against the malware so we didn’t need to worry. There was no thought given to possibly suggesting to the rest of the campus that they might want to switch browsers. So, the security attitude is that, if our antivirus company can come up with antivirus signatures fast enough to counter the constant new threats then we don’t have to change browsers.

Of course this assumes that the company can come up with the new signatures and more importantly, that every single machine on campus and the entire faculty/staff/student home machines will at all times be perfectly up to date. It seems easier to make this assumption than to send out a notice to people that they might consider switching browsers.