Behind the Headlines: Ecademy chief blames intranets for Love Bug chaos

Corporate intranets are a poor safeguard against virus attacks such as last week's worldwide Love Bug crisis.

That's the view of Thomas Power, founder of ecommerce institute, Ecademy, who added that many people were affected by viruses because their company mail servers failed to intercept attachments.

On this week's Behind the Headlines, Power said: "The intranet service doesn't work, it's not secure. How do we fix the security issue? We get rid of intranets."

He also claimed Microsoft was not solely to blame for the outbreak and advocated a complete reassessment of email culture instead.

Power said viruses will always exist and people "should be paranoid" about them. If IT managers monitoring company mail servers were not vigilant in installing protection systems, they should be held responsible for the damage and cost, rather than blame the software.

He added: "We are never going to keep up with these kids who are playing their games. It's just to entertain themselves and to entertain the world - and you can't blame individual users for opening the attachments. The system is maintained by the chief IT officer of the corporate who run those intranets. If they can't look after them then they must be responsible for what happens."

Another panellist, Chris Setz, director of the Network Professional Association, disagreed, and laid the blame squarely on Bill Gates' shoulders. He said: "The majority of email users bought products from one company - and it turned out to be a strategic disaster."

Also on the agenda in the programme was the EU's recent Ecommerce Directive, which was passed in record time and calls on all member states to implement new ecommerce regulations within 18 months.

You can watch this week's Behind the Headlines in the Server Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a37452 ).