The greatest threat to Internet security is not Osama Bin Laden, creepy “hackers,” international terrorism, or the Russian Mafia. While these all may be threats, the greatest threat to Internet security is the ignorant computer user. Sadly, when it comes to Internet security, most computer users are pretty ignorant.
Now that I’ve managed to offend most computer users, allow me to explain, because ignorance can be cured by education.
While the Internet can be a wonderfully useful and entertaining tool, all of the stories you’ve heard about the Internet being a nasty, dangerous place are true. The comparison to an “information superhighway” is actually a pretty accurate. When driving on an interstate highway, you are truly taking your life into your own hands. However, the Internet highway is a billion lanes wide, traffic laws are few, with even fewer traffic cops. Everyone has a high-powered racecar going at top speed, and most drivers are wearing blindfolds. Let’s call those blindfolded drivers the “sheep.”
To make matters worse, your car has a giant bull’s-eye painted on the back, and the highway is overrun with malevolent drivers determined to cause a wreck. However, the malevolent drivers are not blindfolded, and they know exactly how to ruin your driving experience. They succeed mainly by conning the sheep into doing their dirty work for them.
The malevolent drivers are criminal computer geeks, terrorists, unethical businesses, organized crime, sexual perverts, vandals, and other assorted miscreants. Let’s call them “the bad guys.” They cause wrecks by covertly installing malicious software programs into the sheep’s computers that are designed to bring the bad guys wealth, power, prestige among fellow bad guys, political gain, and other illicit satisfactions. These programs (known as “malware,” short for malicious software) have names like viruses, trojans, keyloggers, back doors, worms, adware, and spyware.
Malware ranges from the annoying to the truly dangerous. Images that pop up unexpectedly, viruses that make your mouse cursor behave erratically, or unwanted programs that run in the background, slowing a computers speed to a crawl, are merely annoying. Other malware is much more dangerous, designed to steal personal information (credit card, social security and bank account numbers, passwords, names, addresses, etc.) for financial gain. Some malware is designed to turn a computer into a “zombie” that will, unknown to the sheep, be remotely controlled by the bad guys to send unsolicited email or malware, attack other computer systems, or distribute computer programs, music, movies and pornography.
The bad guys can also ruin a sheep’s day by tricking them into divulging personal information or installing malware by responding to bogus email, visiting fake websites that look just like the real thing (such as your local bank), clicking on links found in instant messages, or opening fake greeting cards. These scams can be known as spam, spim, phishing and pharming.
Next episode, we’ll further examine the plight of the sheep, and examine ways that you can leave the fold.