Users of poorly-protected PCs are at risk of losing every bit of information on them
Digital You or Digital Poo?
McAfee's Mangled Museum Metaphors*
Broadband uptake is growing massively and set to deliver ever greater bandwidth. VoIP is now a practical reality. And TV-over-IP is coming along nicely, thank you. But, all the same, the internet is in a worrying state, if not necessarily on the brink of massive crisis.
The majority of home-PC users that surf the net or send and receive email do so on systems that, front-to-back, are frighteningly insecure – to my mind, at least, but, in too many cases, not theirs.
Internet service providers typically don't filter for spam, viruses or Trojans; and nor do lots of their customers. Most who use old-style modems have no firewalls, and many who have ADSL modems don't properly set up the firewalls that are built in.
Too many operating systems and browser and email programs – mostly Microsoft-sourced - aren't as secure as they should be, especially given the shortcomings further up the line.
Things would be better if everyone running a Microsoft operating system had an up-to-date version of Windows XP and moved away from the bundled browsers and email clients to more secure non-Microsoft programs that are available as free downloads. But huge numbers still run the far-less-secure operating systems that pre-date XP along with the internet tools – still flawed even with XP - that Microsoft builds in.
Consequently, many web users – perhaps a majority - are exposed, every day, to threats that most are unaware of. At best, a poorly-protected net-connected Windows PC will be running at a fraction of its potential speed due to all the Trojans working in the background.
At worst, users of such PCs are at risk of losing every bit of information on them – often valuable information that's not backed up or stored in any form anywhere else. They're also at risk of being spied on, ripped off and dumped upon until the fateful day when, quite possibly, a virus wipes their hard disks completely or perhaps just something vital.
Do I exaggerate? Well, I honestly can't remember the last time I saw an unprotected net-connected PC that wasn't in a dire state, running at a crawl because of Trojans and virus infestations – quite often hundreds of them, and sometimes thousands.
So, you can, perhaps, imagine how pleased I was to be invited along by anti-virus software firm McAfee (the self-styled "leader in intrusion prevention and security risk management") to the start of its two-month-long initiative to educate the great British public about the dangers that lurk on the internet and come in by email. Or, at any rate, that part of the GBP that visits the Science Museum in London.
Unfortunately, whenever expectation is high, disappointment can be severe – and so it was with me and...