address book?
Q. That was in 2002. Have users got smarter since then?
A. FriendGreetings was a problem for system administrators,
because of the unwanted email it generated. It was an
annoyance for users, for the same reason. The application also
had the troublesome side effect of preventing programs from
appearing in the taskbar, which interfered with the correct use
of an affected PC until it was correctly cleaned up. But
FriendGreetings didn’t set out to steal information that could
be used to plunder your bank account or to carry out
fraudulent transactions.
Phishing has raised the bar in terms of the risk that each user,
and each user’s organization, faces from malicious code. This,
in turn, has raised both concern and awareness about malware
and the importance of preventing it. Whether this counts as a
silver lining to the cloud that organized crime has brought
into the malware scene is not clear, but an optimist would say
that it has.
Q. That’s an interesting observation, but I notice you have
skirted the question. Have users got smarter since 2002?
A. Security experts are always on a slippery slope when
commenting on the knowledge, or lack of it, shown by
users. To come down too hard against users sounds arrogant,
but to exonerate them from any responsibility for their own
PCs is to assume that technology can solve all security
problems, which, as we demonstrated light-heartedly at the
outset, it cannot.
However, recent research carried out in the USA [9] paints a
rather dismal picture of levels of common sense amongst
users. (More
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24