Worms hit home

My older brother is a long-haul trucker who carries a laptop with him. He bought a new top-tier machine recently, and upon returning home from work decided to plug it into the Internet. "Run Windows Update right away!" I cried, and he did. Yet somehow before the process was even completed he was already infected with the latest worm at the time, Welchia, and his machine started to reboot. I tried to explain to him over the phone how this can happen, but in his mind it made no sense at all. He had anti-virus software installed, and it was a brand new computer. He simply plugged it into his broadband connection, turned the machine on and look what happened. Well, let's step out of our shoes as security professionals for a moment and imagine yourself to be the average user -- this is the current state of computer security for a typical user's Microsoft (R) Windows (TM) experience.

Its hard to look from that perspective. I've been a system administrator for so long....