I find it hard to believe that 70% of American’s even know what a firewall is.

Well, they probably just assume that it is some part of the antivirus. I don’t actually know many people who know what a firewall is.

I bet the Japanese would raise the bar. They are way too tech savvy not to know that kind of stuff.

I just spent 6 hours at a friend of a friends house. Went over to look at one thing, then noticed that NONE of his 4 pc’s had active anti-virus software or any form of anti-spyware. Avast picked up a total of 107 viruses and Spysweeper found another 37 items across all the pc’s. Funny thing is is 15 year old daughter was pissed at me because her system was down during the scans and just kept saying that the pc’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. Ofcourse it was the worst of the 4 pc’s. I don’t expect users to know everything, but to be completely blind amazes me.:roll:

This is exactly the kind of story I was expecting to hear! It always amazes me that someone could have 4 computers in the house without one having an anti-virus. Yikes!

Most people tend to have whatever came with their computers when they purchased it. So, I find they’re usually running a version of Norton. But the fact of the matter is, it almost doesn’t even matter what people run. They’ll always find ways to infect their computers to hell and back.

The first thing I always do for people I see using Norton or McAfee is remove it. I know when the license expires they will not renew it, and then they are vulnerable all over again. But yes, no matter what there are plenty of people out there who are magnets for viruses.

There’s no doubt that you could write a malicious macro, but you could do a similar thing in OpenOffice on Linux if you really wanted to. I’m actually surprised at how many OpenOffice users never realize that there have been security holes opened up in Linux as well due to the office suite.

Now that sounds like a good time! I try to stay clear of doing things like that because of how ignorant people are, and they never really appreciate anything you do. You’ll go back over in two weeks just to find out that it is worse than before. *sigh*

Unfortunately users can’t get a subscription to that in the store.

That good news! Kinda funny how it has its ups and downs.

That is a great application, but unfortunately it is only the tech savvy that know about it. That’s the people who need it the least!

[psi.secunia.com]

And the third would probably be using an AV program.

This just in: Viruses and spyware spreading like wildfire

It’s naivete, and it doesn’t help that computer resellers are about the hardware and the fun stuff, but they probably don’t push the security very hard.

Remember: no matter how idiot proof you make something, the world WILL create a bigger idiot!