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Users Worldwide Feel Internet Is 'Safer'
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Feb 06, 2008 02:22 PM
from the haven't-been-to-the-seedy-parts dept.
from the haven't-been-to-the-seedy-parts dept.
buzzardsbay writes "Baseline Magazine is reporting on a study by Cisco that teases out the differing attitudes about online security among users across the globe. For instance, remote workers worldwide think the internet is getting safer ... except the folks in Italy and Germany. These folks also have a lot of faith in their corporate IT departments as 51 percent said their work computers are more secure than their personal PCs, and nearly half (45 percent) believe they are more vulnerable to malware and hacks when they're working outside their corporate perimeter. Irony of ironies, the Brazilians hold Net security in the highest regard."
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Ignorance is Bliss (Score:5, Interesting)
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Most malware infections are fixed because it slows the box down to a crawl and degrades the user experience; if the malware authors can fix that, people will NEVER get their stuff fixed.
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Ripe for the plucking? (Score:1)
Next program by DHS: Be patriotic, install our red white and
Wouldn't the irony of ironies be (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wouldn't the irony of ironies be (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Stupid ajax interface! Select boxes without confirmation buttons or an undo feature? Really?
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No. If it got modded overrated, it might be ironic, or at least a bit funny. But insightful? nah.
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if this study was conducted by Cisco Brazil [lightreading.com]?
what does safe mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, if you're running unpatched versions of XP you could have the most secure password ever yet it's meaningless when you have a rootkit with a keystroke logger that's sending your password to a script kiddy in Russia.
Perhaps people "feel" safer because the marketing departments of certain companies... (Microsoft) tell them they are..
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Re:what does safe mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also of note is that the article consistently confused the issue of whether people said they felt safer or whether more people said they felt safe.
On a related note, according TFA, France holds net security in the highest regard, not Brazil. Brazil showed the greatest improvement in people who hold it in high regard. I think. The article was so poorly written that I can't even say for sure if that's what it was saying.
Parent
I must have missed something. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I must have missed something. (Score:5, Funny)
Because when you have a brazillion PCs to keep track of, maintaining any semblance of security becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.
Parent
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Anywho, to GP, a very large portion of network attacks come from Brazil. I would say that a widespread knowledge of network security is what is allowing people to feel safer, as opposed to Germany, which recently outlawed research in the field. Then again, I am a security researcher, so I have a bit of a bias
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Perhaps because Brazil is murder-tastic. Check this out...
http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2006/09/25/brazil_murder_rate_similar_to_war_zone_data_shows/ [boston.com]
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Noooo! It's a Brazilian WAX (Score:2)
Perhaps it's a double irony in that TFA's Google Earth feed got hacked and Nigeria/Brazil got swapped.
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and many MANY others...
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By using such "kill'em all" rule, you're either incompetent, or your e-mail server is irrelevant.
widespread negligence, incompetence and Corruption (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that ISPs simply don't care.
I work at the Brazilian Gov't and even security reports from me are bluntly ignored by those ISPs.
You may try to report to CAIS [www.rnp.br] (which is supposed to be "the" security network center in Brazil for the national academic network) and you know what? You'll receive and acknowledge response and that's it, nothing else will happen.
The only time they do something were in cases such as fake Paypal pages, I believe because there was money involved.
An example on how things work here:
Once we complained to CAIS about this scum [funpar.ufpr.br] from this university [www.ufpr.br] which were deliberately sending their spam (not an infected machine sending random viagra messages) and guess what CAIS did.. Exactly, nothing.
I suppose that junk is related to some project they've managed to get public money from, because we complained so many times and nothing were done (there's _always_ something fishy involved).
Until I picked up the phone called that university directly and told them I would block them completely unless they stopped that spam.
The guy who answered me simply started to say he would talk to the Rector, to politicians XYZ and who knows else, and implied that I could get into trouble.
To shorten the history.. In the end we've managed to stop that junk. But see how much did it cost.
I know so many rotten histories on Brazilian Internet, from the gov't side, from the private companies... A book could be written about that.
Parent
I *used* to think the internet was safe. (Score:3, Insightful)
You feel secure for a while, then you get duped into clicking on a goatse/rotten.com type link. *shudder*
Really, that's what bothers me more than anything else. The occasional "Find sexy singles in your area ads" don't really bother nor register to me anymore. However the occasional gore (The disgusting kind, not the ex-vp kind) that lurks on the Internet really gets to me.
The goggles - they do nothing!
Block the shock with HOSTS (Score:2)
Here's one example. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
Cheers.
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Erm, it's not that trivial. (Score:2)
On the other hand, perhaps you can decipher cryptic links by staring at your status bar, in which case, more power to you.
Cheers.
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The Internet is Vast... (Score:4, Insightful)
(I apologize for rambling, I'm sick in bed hopped up on meds)
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You get that right ! Internet is 'perceived' safer because almost no recent virus/trojan/whatever format your disks
Today, you will get a few mostly inefficient keyloggers (they are almost always targeted at US
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yes it is! (Score:1)
Of course it'll be safer.
5 lines are cut (Score:3, Funny)
Random Thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything I might be slightly more confident as these days. I've always been a hardware geek and as case mods have come down in price and the software to support them has matured, I now have instantaneous access to system resource utilization and temperatures through various means that allow me to gauge my computer utilization with a glance, contrast that to the task at hand and you know when things are being accessed outside of your control. The cost of a hardware based SPI firewall is within anyones range. Also memory prices are so cheap you can afford the extra 128+ required to leave a software based firewall, anti-virus and network logger running.
And I always delve into windows to ensure maximum resources are available for gaming. So along the way I get to know windows on a level most never do. So all it takes is a quick glance at which processes are running to keep me feeling okay about things.
Really the only thing that worries me are rootkits, but I ran those scanners once in a while. However I don't really know how much faith I should be putting in them... Either way a competent user shouldn't have to much to worry about.
With that being said, I don't think I would put quite as much faith in network security at work, granted the admin's are paid and trained to do what they do. But they also, generally, have an increased workload and many other responsibilities.
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Good job those rootkits are so well behaved and don't try to hide from the process list then, isn't it?
Felling safe (Score:2, Insightful)
What the applications may be doing in the background when using Windows is another matter. Connect to get an update of a package, and oh by the way, lets send some encrypted "anon" user data, or you need to enable a feature for the package you paid for, and the only way to do it is to do it online - and who knows what that sends about your system (enabling some CODEC'S in Adobe Premier Elements springs to m
I remember the time when most networks... (Score:2)
Internet in my perception became unsafe when all the trash came online.
From the gut (Score:2)
My guts tell me that my data is safe.
ISP's and worms (Score:2)
Mind you...I could be deluded. But for various games I cannot get to work through my router I have to run XP without it, and even with my balls hanging out there I haven't had any trouble..that I know of. I do run Ethereal that way from time to time and it seems pretty trafficless except for ARP's and such.
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Safer than what? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:OMFG! (Score:5, Insightful)
These days the ones that were once bitten are twice shy, and if you run a decently updated box with no random cracks from the Intarwebs chances are slim you'll have any problems. Just recently I read that the online banks were starting to decline proposals to increase security - it was rare enough that simply paying up if people got swindled made more sense. In short, I think the people left that are getting suckered for the most part are the ones that'd get suckered by phone, by mail, by fax or any other way you'd get in touch with them.
Parent
Re:OMFG! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet isn't much safer, the users are just as clueless, and water is still wet. The only thing that's improved is defense against automated attacks, which while a very good thing, is still just the tortilla on the enchilada.
Parent
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The same with the net back in 1998. Most people use dialup AOL was the king of internet and many people though they were using the internet while never leaving AOL servers. The Buffer Overflow hack was just newly d
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You couldn't be more right.
I'm in danger every day. When I drive my car I'm in incredible danger. I could die, or worse, be confined in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. If you work construction you are in the most dangerous profession there is. If I'm in a bar I'm in danger of some drunk [kuro5hin.org] busting a bottle over my head. If I walk outside I can get struck by lightning. If I cross the street I can be hit by a car.
Danger? I don't think that word means what you people on the intern
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Not quote there...... (Score:1)
Go from there with your own creativity.