Like a lot of people who have worked in the business, I find myself in conversations about computer security with people who are having problems or know people who have problems. I wrote this to save me from explaining the same thing over and over again to different people, and to save them the trouble of having to make notes as we talked. It was meant to be something you could give to a 'naive user' and have them be able to read and follow it more or less unaided, and while not being a complete guide, at least be something that made them more secure than before they got it.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Which is where user education comes into play, my wife and daughter know better because I take the time to educate them. With my daughter it is standard procedure, if she is not sure she asks me. Music downloads (and we all download music in our house) is limited to samples through approved web sites (CD Baby, Amazon, etc.). She also uses IM (both AOL and MSN), no downloads are allowed at all. The end result is few if any security issues.
Most of the users you reference fall into what I call the "clueless" category, either by accident or design. And unfortunately for many it is by design, they prefer not to know because it is "too hard to understand" or "too much to learn". With children it is also a lack of parental control, or the parents being "too busy" to see or learn what Johnny is doing (thus the situation where the kids know more about computing than their parents). When I did phone support for Canon I took a call where the parents handed the phone over to their son because he knew more about the problem than they did!
It is too easy for many people to skate by and expect their more knowledgeable friends/neighbors/workmates to bail them out when they get into trouble (I know, I get the frantic calls from my wife's friends). And until these people decide it is their responsibility to maintain their computer hardware and software, no amount of guides will help them out.
Member since:
2005-10-12
"Alcibiades' description of the effects of malware assumes the user goes to every warez/porn/malware/social engineering/phishing site on earth"
Well not really. At least not around here. I have seen a pro shop down the street in the process of taking several hundred items off a family machine, and another family paying for a disinfection of similar scale - and the comment was, you don't understand what normal use is these days, its ring tones and music downloads, and instant messaging, and that's what does it.
Then I know of two machines in another family made essentially unusable by a family visit of a (girl) teenager. They didn't know what she had done. But I doubt very much it was porn. It was probably just instant messaging. I know for sure of one case in which ringtones were to blame, because the mobile in question was charged with them. Then another local case in which the guy for sure had not been to any porn site or even warez, and he had quite a few pieces. All he ever does is probably read the papers and shop.
The really eye opening experience for me has been how innocently you can be infected. The cases I've seen, you really don't have to have done anything deliberately 'out of line' or risky, just get a little careless. Scary.