Fergie's Tech Blog

Secunia Defends its Word Worm Rating

Scott M. Fulton III writes on BetaNews:

The chief technology officer of security firm Secunia, which issued an "extremely critical" rating for a worm exploiting a previously undiscovered Word 2000 vulnerability, is defending his company's policies in the face of competitors who have rated the severity of the worm as "very low." He told BetaNews the warning was indicative of how severe the worm could be if it infected a user's system.

Secunia's Thomas Kristensen said the risk rating of a worm should not be confused with the critical rating of its vulnerability. Since a worm is not a virus, by design, it cannot propagate itself widely. As a result, he said, when one examines the world's networking environments as a whole, damage assessments from any worm become more limited, "in turn causing anti-virus companies to give it a fairly low rating."

posted by Fergie @ 9/07/2006 10:46:00 AM