Advisories

No Wonder We Get Hacked!

People don't know crap about PCs

By Alexandru Dumitru, Security News Editor

12th of September 2007, 15:13 GMT

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I was just browsing the Net to see what news have popped up recently when I accidentally ran into an alarming fact - 40% of European citizens suffer from digital illiteracy, as c|net informs.

Those figures are huge and I guess that they are bigger in some countries. How can you expect to be secure when you have no idea what's that machine in front of you? And now I'm not talking about people that aren't using computers. There are some that really don't need PCs nor do they like them for leisure purposes or other stuff. Leave those aside, but it's really outrageous to use a computer and not know anything about it, except how to play a movie or how to get inside a game.

Some people use a computer at work, but just to send e-mails, to draw tables and stuff like that. It has happened to me (and not once) to ask someone who works on a PC what AV they are using or if they have Windows' firewall turned on, or other various security questions and I got a "I don't know answer". Then I asked how they cannot know whether they have an AV or not deployed on their machine. They admitted that they didn't know too much about PCs and asked me how they could tell. Of course, I told them to look in the bottom right corner of the screen, near where the clock is displayed and to tell me what icons are displayed there. Of course, as I was suspecting, they had no AV protection. I met several of these cases, but I didn't think that this was a general issue.

In any case, 40% of the European citizens have close to zero, or even zero computer skills, so how can you expect to work on security?

TAGS:

insecurity | computers | hackers

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