Now that’s what I call viral marketing
October 17th, 2006 | by jg3 |You may call it a dirty campaign, but I think Apple releasing a iPods with a virus that impacts Windows computers is hilarious. Of course I’m not supportive of deceptive or malicoius behavior. But I find real amusement in the time bomb it sets up for Apple. If you read their description of the situation you notice a certain lack of contrition in the tone. They say, oh it’s just a “small number — less than 1%” (yeah, of eight million). Over and over they call it a “Windows virus” but the virus wasn’t written by Microsoft. It was written to target Microsoft Windows machines because they are the easiest targets and most widely distributed platform. With the increasing popularity of OS X comes an increase in the threats to that platform. In the future it will be platform-independent or a OS X -targeted malware that gets distributed on some popular consumer device and, well, let’s just hope Apple has some good recipes for how to eat crow.
This is not a Windows problem any more than the flammability of gasoline is a car problem. Fundamentally this is a social problem exacerbated by the lack of diversity in the computing environment. Windows just happens to be the easy and productive target, for now.
Furthermore, looking up RavMonE.exe in the Sophos threat database we learn that it installs a backdoor and contacts a list of sites to report successful infection. I sure would love to get a copy of the version on the iPods and find out what sites are in that list!
Filed under: Computers, Security
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