Mikko Hypponen
Mikko Hypponen
Mikko Hermanni Hyppönenis a computer security expert and columnist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
affects computers security
The vulnerability probably affects more computers than any other security vulnerability, ever.
avoided boot cleaned computers everybody happen home machines majority people problem until vast work
(The) vast majority of the machines infected...are home computers. Nothing will happen on them until people get home from work and boot up their machines. We'd like to think that they whole problem was avoided and everybody cleaned up their machines in time. But unfortunately, that's probably not true.
bad design needed
This was not a bug; this was something that was needed at the time. It is just bad design, design from another era.
care collected foreign intelligence legal monitor though worried
U.S. intelligence has the legal right to monitor foreign communications as they go through to U.S. service providers. However, even though something is legal doesn't make it right. I'm not American; I don't really care about what data is being collected about American citizens. I'm worried about us, the foreigners.
attack computer hours online sleeping target
There is no need to have your computer online 24 hours (a day) as a target of an attack when you are sleeping or away from your computer.
bad believe boys fact less people seeing situation targeted virus
We are seeing less of the big virus outbreaks such as Sasser and Blaster, and so some people believe the situation is getting better, when in fact it is getting worse. The bad boys are getting more professional and doing more targeted attacks.
blocking free german listed pages percent problem recommend systems
We have listed URLs that we are recommending systems administrators block. We don't recommend blocking the whole domain, as 99 percent of the pages on these free Austrian and German domains are OK. You should just block the problem URLs.
although bug code exploit known moment older
Although the WMF bug is there (in the older versions), there's no known code at the moment to exploit it.
company easily entering entire infected large phone somebody
A large company would not want somebody entering their premises with an infected phone because they could easily infect the entire company's phones.
great mechanisms obviously offices throwing uses work
You should have mechanisms of communication, like faxes, which are obviously getting removed from offices because nobody uses them anymore. Faxes are great when e-mail doesn't work. I wouldn't be throwing them away.
mac market
There was no market because there were no Mac viruses.
actively attack block everybody involved knows later lay likely low malicious might rather virus writer
There might be no attack at all. As everybody knows about the attack, the virus writer may lay low and attack at a later date. The ISPs involved can actively block malicious postings. It's more likely the attacker will lay low or be blocked, rather than succeed.
attacks causing false improve percent possible strike systems time
Antivirus systems need to strike a balance between detecting all possible attacks without causing any false alarms. And while we try to improve on this all the time, there will never be a solution that is 100 percent perfect.
exploit
This is enough to invoke the exploit and infect the machine.