Greed: The real reason for Sobig and MyDoom's "success"

Already, experts are beginning to talk about how MyDoom revealed the inadequacies of countermeasures designed to thwart such attacks. Respectively, MyDoom and Sobig rank first and second in terms of the severity and global scope of the damage. Just in case security experts get too focused on the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) component of MyDoom, let's not forget that both attacks had some commonalities that the vendor community has so far refused to collectively deal with, despite being asked to intervene.

Were it not for the greed of many e-mail technology companies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are looking for ways to capitalize on the root cause of these two transgressions (spam), a majority of the undesirable results from Sobig and MyDoom (ranging from inbox nuisance to monetary damage) could have been avoided.

Who's on my "most greedy" list? First, the ISPs through whose systems most of the Internet's e-mail traverses. This group includes Yahoo!, MSN, Earthlink and AOL, among others. Second on my list are the companies that make the e-mail client and server technologies that send and receive email. This group includes IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and Qualcomm (makers of Eudora), to name a few.

http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/perspectives/0,39001148,39167655,00.htm