There was some news last week regarding an online banking service and the fact that someone at this particular bank forgot to renew some Web site security certificates. The story caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, because of the job that I do here at Symantec I need to take note of reports such as these. They are often chalked up to human error and as this article on theregister.co.uk states, a lot of these issues are unfortunately considered to be only small problems. It may be a small problem because the solution isn’t difficult to obtain, only time consuming, and hopefully doesn’t affect anyone adversely. (In this case the problem didn’t affect the security or integrity of the Web site in question and was rectified quickly.) However, I personally consider these issues to be bigger problems because I can’t surf the ‘net as quickly as...
TechNewsWorld recently published an articlediscussing how epidemiologists are using the outbreak of a virtualdisease in a MMOG to study human behavior and hopefully apply thelessons to future outbreaks of disease. The incident in question is theintentional introduction of a plague by Blizzard Entertainment twoyears ago into its own World of Warcraft, basically to “add a littlekick” to the game.
The disease was called Corrupted Bloodand, just for fun, the makers made it truly viral so that, onceinfected, gamers would pass on the virus to others. That said, thepandemic was supposed to be limited to a new area in the game onlymeant to be accessible to high-level players who, it was presumed,would have the strength and knowledge to deal with the disease.
