Even Microsoft, the company that makes a lot of noise about the need for antivirus measures, has been caught with its guard down. The two big virus attacks of the last few months hit Microsoft's own in-house computers harder than they hit any other company's PCs. The message we all should be getting from this unpleasant experience has two parts The first and easiest to digest is that there are bad people in the world. Halfwits who create viruses are bad people. The second is that we' re nuts if we continue to treat viruses as if they were water nymphs or mosquitoes or something merely pesky.
Viruses are bad news in a big way.
They can cost you a lot of money in lost wages or lost orders or lost checks at the bank. Or they could all of us a lot more in lost confidence. If we can't trust stuff that comes into our computers from afar, we'll stop treating the Web like the world's most wonderful shopping mall and do our business the old-fashioned way, face to face with somebody we hope we can trust. Taking viruses seriously is not a complicated matter. You need good antivirus software and you need to use it.