Flashes of Panic

USA Today ran a really good series this Wednesday and Thursday in the Tech section about how ordinary users’ systems are being cracked, compromised and exploited, and what they can (or can’t) do about it. Start with “Are hackers using your PC to spew spam and steal?” and follow the “related links” to the right for the rest of the series.

Two interesting points about this series: First, while the authors advocate buying (relatively) anti-virus software as usual, and remind users that they need to keep their definitions up to date, they admit there are free firewall and spyware-scanning packages. This seems to be rare in the tech press; there’s a subtext that “free == worthless” which is only gradually eroding. (If only they’d mentioned the free AVG anti-virus, they’d score a 10 here.)

Second, the second large part of the series, “Costs, conflicts, inconvenience confound counterattacks,” hits beyond users, suggesting that ISPs and software manufacturers need to step up to the plate as well. They note with approval AOL and Earthlink’s policies of denying access to users whose machines are determined to be malware sources; I certainly wish some ISPs would pay attention when I tell them how I’m regularly getting worms relayed by the same systems in their networks. The article also makes a point I’ve made here before, that subscriptions to virus definition files are a cash cow for anti-virus vendors even though a more effective approach would watch for suspicious behavior and block that instead of waiting for each virus to be specifically identified.

I want to see the costs of securing Windows drive the price up to where Windows boxen are at price parity with Macs, and see what happens to platform market share. That would be fun to watch. Monoculture leads to bad soil.

Now playing: Always Dancing, Never Getting Tired from Universal Hall by The Waterboys