My current non-work project is helping my elderly mother write her life stories. She uses Google docs, which makes it easy for me to rollback changes when she accidentally deletes a story. When she gets stuck working her laptop (which is often), I use a remote desktop application to help her. She is having a great time reconnecting with friends and discovering how much great information is out there. However…
She does not read error and dialog boxes, because nothing contained in them makes sense to her, so she just clicks OK if she cannot reach me. I make sure she is running a firewall, has current anti-virus software, and installs all security patches, but she does not understand what they are or why she needs them. I had to convince her that using abc123 as a password for all of her accounts was a really bad idea.
Ironically, she emphasized real dangers lurking in the open and around the corner when I was a child. Why it was important to look both ways. Why it was important not to get into a stranger’s car. Internet dangers are every bit as real as the friendly stranger in the black sedan, but they just don’t seem real to her. I have come to realize is that my mother trusts everything and everybody on the Internet. That makes her a typical computer user and an easy victim of cyber criminals.
While I can help one person, there are real heroes fighting cyber crime globally and protecting millions of users. The recent arrests of the perpetrators of the Mariposa botnet (also known as the Butterfly botnet) emphasizes the effort required to get the evil-doers. The FBI worked with Spanish and Slovenian law enforcement to make the arrests with the information gathered by the Mariposa Working Group.
Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist with Neustar, helped establish the private/public Mariposa Working Group to investigate the Mariposa botnet (also known as the Butterfly botnet ). The botnet infected over 12 million computers in 190 countries. A botnet is a collection of computers infected by a virus or worm, that work as one to steal credit card and bank account information, launch denial of service attacks, and spread viruses. The software that creates the botnet is looking for computers with easy-to-guess passwords, outdated or non-existent anti-virus software, and vulnerable versions of operating systems.
Thank you Rodney, for helping us sleep better at night, even though most of us have no idea that cyber criminals in Slovenia and Spain are trying to take over my Mom’s computer.
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