In a major screw-up that has nothing to do with Tequila, Google sent out the Kama Sutra worm to 50,000 video email subscribers. The worm also known as W32/Kapser.A@mm was mistakenly sent by Google’s video team on Tuesday night.
In an apology post on their video blog site they said this “Still, some of these posts may have contained a virus called W32/Kapser.A@mm — a mass mailing worm. If you think you have downloaded this virus from the group or an email message, we recommend
you run your antivirus program to remove it.
If you do not have an antivirus program, you can download Norton Antivirus software for free from the Google pack, http://pack.google.com/intl/en/pack_installer.html?nopers
We’re sorry for any inconvenience, and we’re taking steps to ensure
that this doesn’t happen again. ”
Google uses the emailing list to alert subscribers of entertaining videos that are posted on their video blog site. The email alerts are sent by a small group of Google employee’s known as the Google Video Team.
It is unclear how the malware got distributed to the subscribers. According to a pcworld.com article Google has taken precautions to prevent this from happening again.
This is definitely not good news for Google. It does not encourage one to want to sign on to be on their video blog mailing list. One positive for subscribers is that the Kama Sutra worm is generally blocked by most antivirus software.
These kinds of mistakes are not uncommon. Almost on a weekly basis there is a story of some type of security breach of people’s personal information being lost or stolen.
Security and privacy remain serious issues. What can be done to prevent these kinds of attacks from occurring is something that is still not fully perfected and may never be a reachable goal.
Maybe Google did learn something from this mistake, maybe not. Risk is a reality for all Internet users.
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Mike is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.