Oh my god! The world is going to end! Better stock up on water, and essentials! The worst bug in the world is coming!
These sorts of doom warnings sound familiar? Well it was a part of the paranoia, and hype that was the Y2K bug. Yeah, most of the country and world were worried that Y2K would shut down so much, not realizing that most companies had been working on fixing Y2K problems for a few years prior.
Jump ahead to 2009. Cornficker, a worm that an Out-Of-Band patch from Microsoft would protect a machine from, and it was available back in October of 08. Lets see, that is 4-5 months that the patch has been around. No reason machines should not have been patched, but hey, a patch released not on normal patch Tuesday can not be that important, can it? Again the cure was there well in advance.
What does this mean? Well again ti shows the lack of understand of IT and computers, a world that people depend on. Yeah I”m being a little preachy, and yeah its interesting to see computer things make the mainstream news, but in all the wrong and misunderstood ways? That does no one any good. Heck there are things such as court cases, patten cases, copyright cases, security breaches, and many other things that should be reported properly in mainstream media due to the fact that the world relies on computers. Instead our field is the bastard child, the one that no one cares about until everything goes wrong, or is at least perceived to go wrong.
Until things change about IT and how it is perceived, we will have another Y2K or Cornficker doom party soon.
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