News Why some computer viruses refuse to die

[Notebook]

I thought they would disappear when software updates were brought out, but I know nothing of software.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44564709


N.

 

[Artlav]

Simple - plenty of people work on the "if it works don't fix it" principle.

Plenty more still carry on the distrust for updates instilled by many early screwups and performance kills.

And an even larger blob of people consider UI changes to be regressions, critical bugs companies forgot to fix before releasing the new versions, and never update as well.

In the end there are still an enormous amount of old software around, and (typically harmless) old viruses coming with it.

 

[Urwumpe]

And there is a lot of old hardware around hidden in factories or inside ships, which also rarely get replaced and still run old versions of the operating systems.

And especially in factories, some "smart" people often get the idea of moving such old hardware into the big intranet (which too often is just like the internet without people protecting you all the time from your decisions) as part of a industry 4.0 cargo cult instead of keeping them separated from the outside world.

For example, there is a nice French software called CATIA. Its version 5.0 is out now for decades, but still there are systems around requiring an old windows for running a 4.0 version of it because of the legacy files or conversion services. And there is no CATIA 5.0 conversion server around yet (that I know of), so you need to install it on a windows workstation (and be very cautious with updates) and make sure nobody evil notices it.

 

[jedidia]

And there is a lot of old hardware around hidden in factories or inside ships

Or ATMs... All of Switzerlands ATMs are still running XP... :facepalm:

 

[Urwumpe]

Or ATMs... All of Switzerlands ATMs are still running XP... :facepalm:

I am still not sure if really ALL computers running OS/2 in German banks had been replaced. :lol:

The Lower Saxon tax agency used to run Solaris and switched gradually to Linux, now the new government has decided to replace Linux on 12000 workstations by a "commercial alternative" (Microsoft) without even calculating first, if this really saves costs. The state government even tries to delay answering to parliament about this, even the finance department is completely clueless about it, they can't tell what they should do with the 6 million € in the budget for replacing Linux by Windows, but they had to stop all Linux software development instantly (which is pretty expensive as well, because of the contracts with the suppliers)

With such decision making, its sure not surprising that old viruses never really die. I wish they would leave such decisions to professionals.