Users Worldwide Feel Internet Is 'Safer'

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."

Ignorance is Bliss

How many of those people surveyed have PCs sending out SPAM behind their backs?

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Precisely. As long as their computer still does what THEY want when they want to do it, it couldn't POSSIBLY have problems! It's spewing out crap to other users? Not my problem, mate!

Most malware infections are fixed because it slows the box down to a c

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That's why dualcore processors are nice. If you limit the malware to only running on one processor, the user would probably never figure it out. I think that most malware authors try not to monopolize the resources. The problem is that if you have one p

Wouldn't the irony of ironies be

if the Nigerian Princes felt the net to be a perfectly secure place?

Re:Wouldn't the irony of ironies be

You do realize that if we all did our part to help these princes out, that eventually there wouldn't be any more Nigerian princes in need of help, right? So pitch in! The only way we'll get these Nigerians to stop bugging us is if we get all their money back to them.

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ignore this post, I accidentally modded parent overrated instead of funny, so I'll post to undo that.

Stupid ajax interface! Select boxes without confirmation buttons or an undo feature? Really?

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Wouldn't the irony of ironies be ...

if this study was conducted by Cisco Brazil [lightreading.com]?

what does safe mean?

You are only as safe as the measures YOU employ to protect yourself. Your email may be hosted by the most secure company in the world but if your password is "password" or "firstnamelastname" or "123456789" etc then all their security measures are meaningless.

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..

Re:what does safe mean?

I think this story is meaningless without someone explaining what was meant by "safe." Did they ask people if they felt safer from malware, or did they ask if they felt safer when buying something from an online retailer? These are very different forms of safety.

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.

I must have missed something.

Why is the comment about Brazilians ironic? Anyone want to enlighten me?

Re:I must have missed something.

Because when you have a brazillion PCs to keep track of, maintaining any semblance of security becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.

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Because tons of zombies, spam and other shit comes from Brazil. There are blackhole spam lists that block pretty much all of Brazil because they are so infested.

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because /^Received: .*dsl.brasiltelecom.net.br.*$/ REJECT

and many MANY others...

widespread negligence, incompetence and Corruption

Brazilian home PCs are infested with all the kinds of stuff simply because the users do not care at all.. This alone is not enough, though, since pretty much everyone around the world behave like that.

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.

I *used* to think the internet was safe.

I use Linux, I keep my stuff patched/firewalled/well passworded (is that even a word?).

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!

The Internet is Vast...

and getting vaster every day. Most security is worthless. Its good enough to prevent a majority of threats from getting through, sometimes. The only thing protecting users is the size of the internet combined with the fact that most of them do not have anything of value stored on their computers. The only thing Joe Sixpack has that Evil Hacker wants is his credit card number, which let's face it, is not enough to retire off of. The only other things that can be taken from Joe Sixpack are his resources; CPU and bandwidth. The net result is you would still have to grind out a living as an Evil Hacker, or get into freelance corporate espionage. So yes, the internet seems safer, mainly because its bigger, not because it is technologically more capable of stopping the bad guys from getting you.

(I apologize for rambling, I'm sick in bed hopped up on meds)

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"The only other things that can be taken from Joe Sixpack are his resources; CPU and bandwidth."

You get that right ! Internet is 'perceived' safer because almost no recent virus/trojan/whatever format your disks ... In the late 90's, if Joe sixpack spent 1

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The only other things that can be taken from Joe Sixpack are his resources; CPU and bandwidth.

You forgot about his porn.

5 lines are cut

Iran is without internet access. Of course it's safer!

Random Thoughts

While I feel the internet has gotten a whole lot shittier with laws encroaching onto our once pristine wild wild west style play ground. I personally don't feel any less safe. There are risks out there of course, just has there has been for a long time now. But by practicing the same techniques I have for ages I'm fairly confident in my box.

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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Obviously, these people are looking for safer ways of getting to mugged whilst searching for kiddie porn.

Safer than what?

The Internet is safer than what? Skinny dipping in the Everglades after dark?

Re:OMFG!

Users worldwide are idiots. The net is drastically more hostile now than it was 10 years ago. right now you have so much crap, scams, fraud and other nasty running about only a drooling moron would think...

Actually I found that there was more such crap 10 years ago, when the Internet economy was supposed to turn everything up-side down and gullible people fell for it in droves because is was new and unknown. And most of all, the tools were crap. There were Outlook worms that'd spread by looking at it, RPC worms, IIS exploits (ok this is getting Microsoft-bashing but they were the dominating software supplier), these days it seems they need to sucker the user into doing something stupid. Plus these days you at least have privilidge separation so you can try to sandbox things.

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.

Re:OMFG!

You haven't done much end-user support, have you? People still install Bonzi Buddy, etc. because they want a furry, cute "friend" or whatever screensavers they can find, and click yes to every prompt because they know that way things will work.

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.

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More secure doesn't mean absolutly Secure. 10 years for your measurement isn't really a good frame. It is like saying driving a was was far safer back in the early 1900's. Where only a few people owned cars and if they did they drove them very carfully b