Myth 9: Security Tweaks Will Stop Worms/Viruses

Worms and viruses (hereinafter collectively referred to as malware) are designed to cause the maximum amount of destruction possible. Therefore, they try to hit the largest numbers of vulnerable systems and, hence, they tend to spread through one of two mechanisms: unpatched/unmitigated vulnerabilities unsophisticated users. Although there are some security tweaks that will stop malware (Code Red, for instance, could have been stopped by removing the indexing services extensions mappings in IIS), the vast majority of them cannot be stopped that way because they spread through the latter vector. Given the choice of dancing pigs and security, users will choose dancing pigs every single time. Given the choice between pictures of naked people frolicking on the beach and security, roughly half the population will choose naked people frolicking on the beach. Couple that with the fact that users do not understand our security dialogs and we have a disaster. If a dialog asking the user to make a security decision is the only thing standing between the user and the naked people frolicking on the beach, security does not stand a chance.