Blog Entry

Weighing the Risks

09 December, 2007

November 2, 2007

The bad guys have made it to the Canadian Government. They are now using the Feds as a phishing ploy. Revenue Canada has issued a warning that if you get an email claiming to be from Revenue Canada, that it may have links in the email that will lead you to a site that will perform a drive-by-download. What is a drive-by-download you ask? Well, it is when you go to a website and the website has code in it that will install something (malware, spyware, adware or a virus) on your computer without your permission.

Why would people do this? With this type of installation, the adversaries can collect information like user ID's passwords, bank account numbers, or track your travels on the Internet and send this information to the bad guys.

I talked about this type of thing in the last blog "IT Terrorism". Now our government is telling us that it is happening and that we should be aware of it.

Now is a great time, just before Christmas, to start to draw up that list of desires that you may want under the tree at Christmas. You may want to start with a good firewall, get a good anti-virus program on your machine, and even possibly upgrade your machine to combat the new threats on the Internet by getting the most secure Operating System yet ... Vista.

I know, I can hear you in the back rows saying, "what are you crazy? I wouldn't put that hog on my computer." "It has all kinds of conflicts, and I hear nothing really great about it, even to the point where Microsoft wants me to buy a new computer just to get their new White Elephant of a system up and running."

Lets make it a little easier. Have a look at this diagram and you can see that the level of security in the operating systems is usually slightly behind the level of risks that can create chaos with your computer system.

Questions come up now. But, if Vista is so good, why won't some of my old programs work on it? The easy answer is that with old technology comes all the old unsecure scary holes in the programs that help to put your information at risk. By upgrading to the newer, more secure operating system, and matching programs, you are closing those risks.

But what about all those annoying pop up windows in Vista? Every time I perform a function, I don't need some stupid computer asking me if that is what I really want to do. Let's go back to the new warning that the Canadian Revenue Agency just put out. If you open up that email in Windows XP and click on the link, you are probably logged into your computer as an administrator. You are saying to yourself, of course I am the admin. It is my computer. Well, when you go to the site, because you are the administrator, the software will not ask you for your permission to install it, you are the administrator, and you must know what you are doing, after all, you are the administrator. So XP just installs the bad software. Your firewall and anti-virus software are saying to themselves, He / She is the administrator, it must be OK.

Fast forward to today's new technology in Vista, and now when you click on that link a UAC (User Access Control) window comes up and says, are you sure you want to install this?? You can see that in the XP version this did not happen because you are administrator. In Vista, everyone, even the administrator runs normally as a standard user, not an administrator, so now you know when something is trying to install itself on your computer. Now you have control. Good control. Proper control.

This is the style of using a computer that Microsoft has been trying to get the planet to use all along. When the law said that you must wear seatbelts now when you drive your car, there was resistance to this change also. The technology threats today dictate that you need to be more diligent in your use of computers. You must understand that there are threats out there that are going to take you down.

To keep up to speed on the information highway, we all need to be wearing our seatbelts, and that now starts with Vista. Vista is the newest in secure operating systems, and it is fear of the unknown and perceived inconvenience that will hinder people from making the good choice to move ahead and keep up the security levels on their computers to keep today's Internet Threats at bay.