Web Numpties
Posted: Tue 10 October, 2006 Filed under: Geeky, News, Security, Thinking About..., Weirdness 6 Comments »On the subject of numb-brained persons, and their inability to deal with common knowledge, is it really a shock to know that a large number of people are still total twunts when it comes to computers? No, not really.
Fair enough, this entire story is about “honeypot” PCs and seeing how long it takes them to be attacked – but by definition these honeypots are unprotected – no firewall, no anti-virus, and (most importantly) a complete numpty at the keyboard.
The survey found 17% of people had no anti-virus software and 22% had no firewall. A further 23% said they had opened an e-mail attachment that came from an unknown source.
I’m sorry, but if people can’t be bothered to use an anti-virus tool, and to activate either Windows’ own software firewall, or get one of their own, then they bloody well deserve to be taken for a ride. As for opening up email from unknown sources, I kind of wrote about this over the weekend, but still, nearly a quarter of people have opened random emails with (one assumes) a subject line that makes them think it’s OK to open? I despair. Mind you, again, people who do that just deserve to be ripped off – it’s like an idiot tax.
At home our broadband connection comes through a box with a built-in firewall and router. There’s also at least a software firewall on all the machines in the house. And all of them use AVG’s anti-virus as a matter of course.
After all, it’s not like it’s difficult to get a decent free bit of anti-virus software like AVG. And OK, while my favourite software firewall has now disappeared (thanks to Symantec, who always were a bunch of scum-sucking weasels anyway) it’s still not difficult to find and install the likes of Zone Alarm, or even to use the entire anti-virus/firewall combinations released by companies like Norton, McAfee, et al.. It’s just that the “Oh, it’ll never happen to me” attitude still prevails, and it’s likely to continue to do so for the forseeable future, and for one prime reason. People are numpties. Simple as that.
Personally I think that all broadband connections – be it ADSL, Cable, ISDN, whatever – should use boxes with at least a basic built-in firewall. I know Windows XP SP2 activated the software firewall by default, and I think that’s a good thing too. I would like to see new PCs come with a decent (and free) anti-virus scanner – although of course Dell et al probably get a huge dollop of cash for pre-installing shit like McAfee on the computers they provide – so that everyone has access to the basic protection, from Day One, without having to shell out extra money.
If PC makers, Broadband providers and so on simply work on the assumption that people won’t bother, and just provide these simple things as a built-in, then a whole load of these problems would go away. Most standard PC users don’t bother uninstalling what comes with the PC, they want to just plug-and-go. So give them the security straight away. Don’t assume that either a) people will know they need this stuff or b) that they’ll go and download and install it as the first thing they do. They won’t. They’ll leave it ’til the PC is a heaving festering lump of viral content, pop-ups, and email shite, and then complain…
The computer’s gone wrong! I didn’t do anything! It’s the computer’s fault!
McAfee has one of the best virus detection engines I’ll have you know!
But yes, there is no excuse. Maybe people should be made to take lessons and pass a test before being allowed to use a computer in the wild. Like driving a car.
What surprises me is that people don’t seem to learn by their mistakes.
On my first PC I couldn’t be bothered to upgrade the virus checker. I did some work at home and discovered that the work PC refused to read my floppy because it was virus infected. I have learnt since. That having been said, AFAIK the only problem with having a virus infectedPc was that I couldn’t transfer stuff from it to the network at work. So I used to just disable the virus checker at work and it was straight forward then.
I jest, of course
MMMM sounds like a load of old tripe to me!!! Trouble is, albeit a bit of a smart arse on the quiet, I know f all about computers. Good for porn, music, and general dicking around. When some people were learning about coding and htmls I was learning fortran and it was a load of balls. Dodnt under stand or care about it. Frankly, some of us have had better or at least other things to do than tart about looking at a screen pressing buttoms(what Im doing now!!!) all friggin day n night. Computers have taken loeads of jobs and essentially mean that the shape of our testicles are known to the authorities. Theres no escape, we are bleedin identitfied. Compouters are arse and we would be all better off without them. I am also annoyed about this running hot water lark too. Load of bullshit.
…Or the can just install linux. No malware ever.
I dont run antivirus, i use this silly little technique called “backups” whereby when something goes tits up on my pc, all my work is magically saved 🙂 Lets be honest, none of the av products have 100% coverage, and anything particularly threatening these days tends to be network aware, and laps the planet long before the AV companies catch it.
Now how many idiots are there around who never back anything up, thinking that symantec will save the day, then get an inevitable hdd failiure / virus/ shoddy microsoft product trash all their stuff?