Consider if you will one of the major perps, the mighty Wintel behemoth, a.k.a. Evil Inc., worldwide purveyors of monoculture, bloatware, and bugs. Let's leave for another day the lessons biology has taught us about the inherent vulnerabilities of monocultures. For the moment, let's just look at how these guys do business. Cole also warned that the existence of the bug had to be kept secret.
Evil is contagious.
Through the centripetal magic of telecom I happen to know a fairly adept Wintel hacker. She recently told the following story on a list we both frequent. She always thought that Norton actually created viruses so people would buy its products. She downloaded Winamp and was playing a CD through it. She normally uses Netscape.