Flower Mound Online News

Should we be concerned about surfing the net? As an avid computer user and one of the earliest ’surfers’, even long before the internet, remember BBS’s, Compuserve, campus nets and ARPANET. Back in the early 90’s, I had the opportunity to meet with Vinton Cerf, credited as being one of the fathers of the Internet.

I came away from those meetings excited just thinking about what might be coming, yet at the same time, in the back of my mind, there was a mild concern of the impact of those changes. Of course, I pushed those concerns aside and continued full force into the online future. In my vision of the future, the virtual library presented in the 1994 movie “Disclosure“, with Michael Douglas is still on our horizon, but when and what does it all mean?

CyberCriminal Sub-Culture
Consumer Reports has just released a new study describing a whole new sub-culture of cybercriminals who have built an elaborate network of websites and chat rooms where they sell credit card tools, credit card numbers and pins, bank account information, complete identies. Sounding like the trading floors of Wall Street, these thieves are brokering our private information, selling stolen identities for $14-18, offering quantity discounts for bulk purchases.

Another group of cyber thieves operate in the real world, stealing data from businesses-dumpster diving, or even stealing hard drive data from retail business computers that contains your personal information and credit card data. See what your hard drive can tell ID thieves. Also see what just happened at the Lifetime Fitness chain right here in the DFW Metro area.

Spam remains the biggest annoyance for us all. And it runs in cycles-we get a wave of spam, then the spam filters catch up and improve blocking, then the next wave comes, etc. Same for virus infections. Consumer Reports found that one in five computers has had a major virus problem and 34% of the survey said they had a virus in the past 6 months. On average, each service incident cost $100.

Home wireless users are at a greater risk. Over half had no data encryption and another third had only the minimal encryption which can be hacked quite quickly. And Public Hotspots expose you to a greater threat than home, since you’re in essence exposing your PC to the same network a hacker may be sitting on in the very coffee shop you’re in! Some day, we’re going to talk about MySpace and children. In short, Parents must know what their children are doing on the PC!

Spyware is another huge problem, and should be treated as one of our biggest concerns. In fact, CR reports that over 850,000 US households have actually replaced their PC in the past six months due to spyware! WOW! That’s almost impossible to fathom.

I can’t begin to count the number of individuals I know who have bought a computer simply because theirs was ‘getting slow’. That usually means spyware or perhaps a virus. Virtually every application we install on our computers starts a running process, whether you’re using the app or not. When you get too many running processes, guess what, your PC gets slower and bogs down!

If you think you might have spyware or a virus, before you go to the extreme of buying a new PC, there are many solutions.

• Call a professional to clean the machine.
• Buy and install a quality Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware application
  Yes, there are a couple good free ones too (AVG Anti-Virus).
• Install the applications and clean your PC.
• Check your PC Firewall (Microsoft Security Center)
• Defrag your Hard Drive to improve performance
• Consider installing a NetNanny type of program on your children’s PC!

Click here to read the full Consumer Reports Article.