Re:HP installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs
by davisdude on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @12:49PM
(#15799531)
Automatic updates aren't always a bad thing. Sometimes they can be very beneficial.
I just finished reading a book [0] about the Conficker worm, which infected people's computers by causing a buffer overflow in an unprotected port.
Windows published the security patch to prevent the buffer overflow as soon as they found it, but they couldn't force users to update. As a result, the Conficker worm continued to spread, despite the company fixing the problem, because people couldn't or wouldn't install the new patch.
While the botnet created by the worm never did anything too malicious, it had the potential to be catastrophic [1]. Experts even talked about it potentially creating enough traffic to shutdown the root servers of the internet.
All that to say, automatic updates aren't always a bad thing. I, too, hate having updates forced down my throat.
Security updates, however, are in a bit of a gray area when it comes to that, IMO.
[0]: Worm: The First Digital World War - Mark Bowden, 2011
I just finished reading a book [0] about the Conficker worm, which infected people's computers by causing a buffer overflow in an unprotected port.
Windows published the security patch to prevent the buffer overflow as soon as they found it, but they couldn't force users to update. As a result, the Conficker worm continued to spread, despite the company fixing the problem, because people couldn't or wouldn't install the new patch.
While the botnet created by the worm never did anything too malicious, it had the potential to be catastrophic [1]. Experts even talked about it potentially creating enough traffic to shutdown the root servers of the internet.
All that to say, automatic updates aren't always a bad thing. I, too, hate having updates forced down my throat.
Security updates, however, are in a bit of a gray area when it comes to that, IMO.
[0]: Worm: The First Digital World War - Mark Bowden, 2011
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker#End_action