I overheard a conversation that put a smile on my face. A friend of a relative was talking to her about the internet and more specifically eBay, the tone changed very quickly as the first thing mentioned was how risky online transactions are.

“Oh, I never put any credit card details online, it’s not safe!” She later went on to inform everyone how it is important to have the “lock” on sites and how some friends were subject to some credit card fraud.

I also hear from many people how they have the latest antivirus and spyware on their machines. When I ask what they do to keep secure, non technical people are technically savvy, usually responding along the lines of “I have Norton Antivirus, run Adaware once a week (sometimes daily!) and now use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer”.

But why does it have to be this way? Imagine the same constructs on something we have in the physical world that is essential to us, our cars. For argument’s sake, on computers we are spending 80% of our time to fix and maintain it to be able to use it for the remaining 20%. Imaging doing the same on your car every day! You would have to get up very early, start tweaking the motor, change the oil, fix the brakes etc for 48mins, just to drive to work which is 12mins away… that is certainly something that no one will put up with. So why are we accepting this for our computers? To help out, I recommend people switch to Mac for their next machine just because they are not going to waste all that time fixing and maintaining it, they will just be able to get on with the work they intended to do in the first place.

Many of the converted have recommended that I go work at Apple as I do such a good job of selling it to them, or have asked if I DO work at Apple?… There was a head of security job going there about 2 years ago that I had a look at… Maybe sometime in the future if something similar came up?

It’s great to see an understanding being spread about the risks and protecting personal information online. Security education and awareness is quite an important factor in the security process to make things a little safer for people online.

Great job people!