It is my opinion that in general people are becoming more aware of Internet threats and identity theft. Most of my associates would never have considered downloading and running something called checkmeout.exe, and I think that this cautious attitude is becoming more prevalent. Of course, this takes away a prime attack vector from hackers trying to build networks of botnets – so they have to be more creative.
Today I read an article talking about hackers targeting Neopets users. The idea is that they offer a rare item for virtually nothing (it’s not free – that might raise too much suspicion). The unsuspecting user downloads this program that allows them to create whatever “paintbrush” they want and *boom* the computer is owned by the hacker. Read the whole article here:
What is particularly insidious is that the Neopets demographic is children. As adults have become more wary the bad guys are targeting naive and trusting children. Of course, the black hats don’t care how the computer is compromised – it has your data on it and they’ll use whatever they can to get to it.
So, how do you prevent you and your family from being victimized? First, educate your kids. There are some good resources online that I will be highlighting in future posts that teach about safe surfing. Secondly, institute some ground rules for your computer. At my home the kids know they are never under any circumstances to click a button labeled: yes, save, download, etc. If they are confronted with such a choice they have to get me or their mother to come and finish. This prevents them from being suckered by things that smell fishy or are shareware trash may toast the pc. Once I instituted this, the kids were actually pretty compliant. Even my tech-savvy 13yo still calls me into the room when installing software and has me complete it. We always take the opportunity to talk about what it is installing and what it could do so that he can make educated judgments later when I give him more autonomy (and he has his own computer on the line).
My advice is to institute a similar policy in your home.
You must log in to post a comment.