Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Why people hate security

Offered as Exhibit A in The People v. Stupid Security.

An antivirus (anonymous to protect the guilty, although ten seconds with Google will reveal all) is blocking a browser from reading a file.

The file is the Javascript interpreter.

Without Javascript, Al Gore's Intarwebz get all achy-breaky. Kaput. Termineé. This is annoyance the Greater.

Annoyance the Lesser is that the browser really (really, really) wants Javascript to work. It keeps trying to load C:\WINDOWS\System32\jscript.dll. Again and again and again.

You get one of these boxes for each attempt.

Quite frankly, this is why security doesn't work too well. If you miss malware on the way in, then shucks, lots of folks do. Nobody is likely to blame you, specifically. If you whack part of the Operating System, you get people yelling at you over the phone. You, specifically.

No wonder so much malware gets by the defenses. The defenders are more afraid of you than of the malware.

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