IT Professionals

Google – Sharing The Love

Posted by on Feb 21, 2007 | 3 Comments

I have wondered when something like this would come home to roost on the Google front. After all, anything with the kind of red carpet access given to it as we see with the Google Desktop is just asking for trouble.

Sure enough, the likely to happen has, well, happened. And even with Google patching the flaw, I think that it had an opportunity to see what it is really like to live in a world where exploits can honestly ruin your day.

Now for the real question: does anyone honestly use Google Desktop? With Vista’s advanced search features (same with the Mac) and Linux offering Beagle desktop search, why would anyone expose themselves like this? Maybe some people are still using this thing out of ignorance? Speaking for myself, I would ban this from my office as anything that is indexing your system with a TOS like what Google is pushing is just asking for problems. Then again, that’s just my opinion.

[tags]google desktop, exploit, security, flaw, TOS[/tags]

  • Anonymous

    This should be made into a self booting iso CD to be used on PC’s that are so infected that they are unusable!

  • http://twitter.com/stephencoles Stephen Coles

    I doubt that number is much higher, if at all. People rarely, if ever, get virus emails anymore (I haven’t seen one in many, many, many years). Clueless people tend not to go to sites or download items where viruses, worms, trojans, etc. are common (warez sites, torrents, etc.). Those who do go to those types of sites are usually smart enough to know what not to open questionable files and if they do, they can usually figure out that they just got infected and need to clean their systems. Bad Facebook apps tend to just post crap everywhere and your friends will point that out to you. ISPs provide free antivirus software and most computers come with at least an antivirus trial, so there aren’t that many people out there without any antivirus protection. If a virus disables your antivirus, you will usually notice eventually. Overall, I think most infections tend to be pretty temporary. Yeah, 5% of people out there probably are clueless enough to get infected and stay infected because they don’t know better, though.

  • http://www.terenceoneill.com Terence O’Neill

    Thanks for posting Ron, I’ll be sure to run the scan.