Just a heads up about organized hackers exploiting Java. When I got home tonight I read about this and started scanning. I did a full system scan with my Avast, nothing showed up. I then did a boot scan and sure enough, 2 major virus attacks, from Java (Oracle). Avast caught it and moved it to the chest in time. I swear, Avast is the best ! I was one of 400,000,000 systems that had it. Java is junk and they have no clue about protecting their product. This is not the first time their crap gave my computer a virus. I hope I can figure how to uninstall it. Java Under Attack Again, Disable Now - Security - Attacks/breaches -
Java has gotten as complex as a full blown operating system, and with complexity the inevitabvle bugs show up, add to that that Oracle is not making any money directly from Java (it's a free download) and you can see the results. The same thing is happening with Microsoft and IE, as they can't charge for it because of the antitrust rulings it gets a lot of marketing but very little good coding (though Microsoft is generally investing more than Oracle in security these days and IE is really the bad apple of the bunch). You would be surprised at how few people actually write code in the big companies, compared to marketing, management, logistics, etc. sometimes a key product has only a handful (litteraly less than 5) full time programmers assigned to it, if one of them has a bad day, and quality asssurance and testing is not wide awake you get a bug. Attackers have the advantage here, they only need to fing one exploitable bug while the programmers have to make zero mistakes (very hard for humans ). Disabling/removing Java is easy, just go to control panel/applications and kill it, but you will be surprised to see how many programms you use rely on it, windows itself will survive as Microsoft doesn't use java for that, but a lot of third party stuff will stop working.
