Dumbing down the process

Sep 18, 2007 10:59 GMT  ·  By

Have you noticed the trend in security these days? Hackers make programs that develop malware at the push of a button. You don't need to be a whiz kid to use IcePack or Mpack or Shark 2 or other similar sites. On the other hand, security software vendors create programs that make users scratch their heads not knowing what to say. I don't know if you ever met someone like this, but there are people that don't know what to pick from the various options their firewall offers them. They just gaze into the screen and if they can't close the windows, they will pick almost at random.

A lot of people working in the security business will use words like botnet, VPN, DDOS, malware, keylogger and who knows what other tech stuff? Now the tech-savvy part of the audience will understand everything, but then again, that's not the part of the public that needs to be addressed. If you know what a VPN is and know the difference between a Trojan and a worm, then you probably already have security measures on your machine. But geeks don't get hacked, do they? Because they have firewalls and anti-viruses! But who gets hacked, then? The people that don't have security measures installed, of course!

It's true that some users don't care much about security, but most of the ones that are unprotected don't know much about it, and that's a fact. You can't tell those people to install an AV to avoid keyloggers and Storm and other threats. You need to explain them in simpler language. And of course, I think that security should definitely be dumbed down. If hackers can do it with malware, then so can security software vendors do with their products. Things will only get better if they are made simple, because people can't handle stuff that they don't understand.