Sophos finds that most business PC users blame systems administrators for spread of Slammer virus

Corporate IT Update, Jan 29, 2003

CORPORATE IT UPDATE-(C)1995-2003 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

The majority of business PC users are blaming system administrators for the spread of the recent Slammer virus, according to a survey from Sophos, an Internet security company.

In total 64% of all respondents believed that the infection rate was the fault of system administrators that failed to update their systems. A further 24% blamed Microsoft for shipping software with bugs in it - Microsoft warned systems administrators of the vulnerability that Slammer exploited in July 2002.

Other results from the survey found that 12% of all those questioned relied on mainstream news reports to tell them about potential security vulnerabilities. Just 43% had signed up to Microsoft's security mailing list.

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