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Iranians, Russians, and Chinese Hackers Are After You, Says Lawmaker
Velcroman1 writes "The House Intelligence Committee is warning that 'time is running out' before the next major cyberattack: The Russians, Iranians, Chinese, and others are likely already on your computer. 'You have criminal organizations trying to get into your personal computer and steal your personal stuff. And by the way, the Chinese are probably on your computer, the Russians are probably on your personal computer, the Iranians are already there,' House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R.-MI) said. 'They're trying to steal things that they think are valuable or use your computer to help them steal from someone else,' he said. 'That's a real problem.'"
I'm wearing my trusty tin-foil hat!
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
just to make sure they aren't and for your own protection.....
The linked article says it all. Nothing but more fearmongering from Fox News, and promotion of CISPA. Someone needs to have their editor's permissions revoked. oh wait....
Amazing. A lawmaker from Michigan learned to read a newspaper headline.
Oh, wait, that's a lawmaker from Michigan. He's just spouting what the lobbyists from Symantec and McAfee are whispering in his year. False alarm.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The real problem is normal users that do not really know what is happening on their computers and really do not care.
It always brings me back to images of windows users with 20 different toolbars loaded in to IE.
banging his wardrum. this is the same asshole who thought iraq was trying to kill us all. how'd that turn out for ya mike? http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17707705/39591107
Good people go to bed earlier.
How much of the crap we put up with would go away if ISPs instituted egress filtering?
Oh, that's not a panacea; it's not going to cure all the interweb's problems overnight, but it would sure as hell eliminate a lot of the low-level crap that goes on.
(grumble grumble grumble)
Oh 1999, how I miss you. Back then I was working at the local CompUSA and had a lady come in looking for security software:
her: "I have a hacker in my computer"
me: "Oh, you mean a virus?"
her: "No, it's my neighbor. He's gotten in there and I need a program to get him out"
me: (head explode)
I do wish I had recorded the entire conversation, but I couldn't convince her that if the her modem wasn't connected to the internet, nobody could do anything with her computer from the outside. She'd gone as far as turning off and unplugging the computer. He was coming through the power lines, through the TV, he was already *in there* hacking away even with the power turned off... I eventually gave up and sent her off with some firewall software. These are the kinds of people we need to get some rational thought into, Gods help us.
+1 Disagree
As a USian, I'm more concerned about US corporations and US government agencies being after me, they are the ones that can do and are most likely to do me some harm. And, I'm not even concerned enough about them to wear a tinfoil hat.
It could be worse. What if they started flying remote controlled drones around the world killing people with impunity?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
... is to require businesses to do a better job of distinguishing between mere identity, and actual authenticated authorization. For example, your SSN is just some numbers that can refer to you. Having an SSN is absolutely not authorization. If someone uses you SSN and a business chooses to charge your or open accounts to allow such charges, then they have failed to obtain authorization. In such a case, it should be required by new sensible law that if you state for the record that you did not authorize the transactions or whatever, then that business may not take any action whatsoever unless and until they can prove that you actually did authorize it. The "not take any action" means they cannot collect on debts, cannot place debts with a debt collector, cannot put it on your credit report (must take it off if already did). It has to be like it never happened.
The big problem with ID theft is that these businesses are not checking authorization. They need to start checking authorization or simply eat the loss.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
1999 called
Did you warn them about 9/11?