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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."
That confirmed it.
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...
(looks at a user sitting in his cube)
Nevermind, I forgot what we were talking about. these people ARE morons.
How many of those people surveyed have PCs sending out SPAM behind their backs?
"That's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage."-Monty Python
...because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.
Now that we are getting the middle east out of the picture.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Seems as though if the ruckus about 'cyberwar' and all the espionage supposedly being carried out online is correct, then all these home users whose security is apparently less effective than their corporation's security (though how effective this corporate security is, opposed to its perception, is a matter of question) would be ripe for use as local proxies, hosts for various malware, or local monitoring of 'net traffic for an enterprising spy.
Next program by DHS: Be patriotic, install our red white and blue firewall (and incidental datamining connection monitor)?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
if the Nigerian Princes felt the net to be a perfectly secure place?
The Internet is safer than what? Skinny dipping in the Everglades after dark?
My blog
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..
The Internet is a far worse place than it was years ago, there are botnets and viruses everywhere. There are millions upon millions of infected Windows machines all over the Internet. Only heavily armed Linux machines have even the remote chance of surviving. The Internet is a Barrage of crap with Phishers, and domain squatters, its horrible. We have the Telcos and CableCos making it worse by violating net neutrality. The Internet is a blasted Hellscape of ruin right now.
Why is the comment about Brazilians ironic? Anyone want to enlighten me?
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!
...probably consider walking alone thru Rio de Janeiro to be safe too.
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)
Of course it'll be safer.
Go from there with your own creativity.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Iran is without internet access. Of course it's safer!
Perhaps it's a double irony in that TFA's Google Earth feed got hacked and Nigeria/Brazil got swapped.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Works on all OSs (well almost) and user editable.
Here's one example. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Tourists in Rio during Carnival? A Hunting trip with Dick Cheney? Driving with Ted Kennedy?
Yeah, you probably won't be harmed, but that doesn't mean it's "safe"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Too many amateur websites out there giving permissions away to scriptkiddies, Islamo freaks, and russian mobsters. Where do you think that Bank of American spoof page is coming from?
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
Feeling safer depends what you're running. I use XP and Linux, feel a fair bit safer when using Linux.
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 my mind).
Windows has it's browser hooked into the system core, how anyone would feel safe with that when using IE!?! With the recent fuss over Skype, do they still think they are "safe"?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Did not have any firewall or other measures.
Internet in my perception became unsafe when all the trash came online.
the internet is safer
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Their computers are more secure, it's the only explanation!
Actually, even *I* can't tell if this is supposed to be marked "5, Funny" or "-1, Troll." I guess numbers really do run in a cyclic pattern.
Weird.
Listen to your guts.
My guts tell me that my data is safe.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
My reply was "Safer than WHAT, exactly?" I've come up with a list of things that are safer than the internet: Harlem. Bagdhad. Suicide Machines. Unwashed store produce. Seriously, considering you can't even trust the companies that claim to produce anti-malware (some of which actually install malware), and there are millions upon millions of more idiots out there than there was 10 years ago... how can you say it's safer? I remember back in 1997, when you could log onto IRC or a Q2 server on Thanksgiving Day and everything was LITERALLY twice as fast just because no one else was around. Back when the worldcom routers would go down and half the internet would just disappear. It's impossible to make the case that more users = more safety. Quite the opposite.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
With services like tinypic and tinyurl and links crafted to use Google's 'inurl:' coupled with 'i'm feeling lucky', it is difficult if not impossible to predict where a link will resolve to...
On the other hand, perhaps you can decipher cryptic links by staring at your status bar, in which case, more power to you.
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
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 (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 from this university 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.
It does seem to me that my last two ISP's, Time-Warner and Comcast, despite all their numerous faults, do a pretty good job of keeping worms in check on their networks.
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.
expandfairuse.org
Right now anyone hacking can be treated as a possible threat to national security. After the war, and when IP Addresses become personal information again and treated like search and seizure laws, companies are going to start having to lock their own doors themselves. And we all know your companies' IT person got to be in charge of the servers because he was the most competent in the technology right?
Why did I think "lambs to the slaughter" when I read that headline?
TFA: The French (72 percent) have the highest perception that the Internet is safe, while Japan (42 percent) has the lowest.