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Story: Viruses cost businesses $55bn last year
Posted by: Mark Appleton (Friday 16 January 2004, 4:02 PM)
Why are businesses not allowed to sue the software companies that produce the easily infected virus software?
Sure, some viruses (i.e. user downloading and running a .exe virus disguised as a program from internet) are simply the users fault for which software companies cannot be blamed.
But in many cases it is flaws in software which cause viruses to get in. As I understand it, Outlook (and/or Outlook Express) is responsible for about 95% of virus infections.
Personally, I stopped using Outlook after I was infected by a virus which automatically executed itself when I simply read an email containing the virus (fortunatly it did no real damage to my business accept the customer relations issue of sending out infected emails to everyone in my address book along with the cost of having an employee spend about a day removing it off the network).
Such a high rate of infections contributed to one piece of software shows obvious flaws are in that software which in any other industry would lead the manufacturers of the product to incur heavy lawsuits and even government action.
What avenues are available to companies to recieve compensation for virus attacks, escpecially (as in my case) where the virus infection was a direct result of a fault in the Outlook Express email software?
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