Monocultures and Document formats: Dan’s Bomb Goes Off

Consortiuminfo.org has published a piece that they believe vindicates Dan Geer, who was fired by his security company because he claimed Microsoft was a monoculture. Whether he was fired from pressure from Microsoft has not been proven. The piece pertains to the new virus that infects computers through Microsoft Word documents.

Link to Article

My Take; This is one reasons why lawyers should not pretend to know anything about technology. This does not vindicate Dan, not even in anyone's wildest dreams. Dan Geer, was more than likely fired because he had no evidence nor facts to back up the claims he made and he still doesn't. This attack is nothing new. Its a virus that targets a flaw in an application software package, Microsoft Word. This is similar to these IM worms and trojans that attach themselves to IM messengers like AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk etc. Word Macro viruses also exist and have existed for many years. This virus does not infect Macintosh users of word, nor any OpenOffice.org application, so I strongly disagree with the "Word format is tainted" assessment. In my opinion, this is another uninformed, unproven false allegation by Consortiuminfo.org