Most computer users ignore basic online security measures
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You may lock your doors and windows - and maybe even activate an alarm system to keep your home protected, but a new study indicates that most of us haven&#39;t taken the equivalent of those basic steps when it comes to protecting ourselves when we go online.
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The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
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Opinion: Whether they realize it or not, many people leave sensitive information out in plain view on Web sites. But sooner or later, a Google search will dig it up.
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Software maintains security on laptops when they're outside the network.
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The relatively new world of online applications is grappling with security issues. Is Web security where it should be? And where should it be going?
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Although more than two-thirds of home computer users think they're safe from online threats, an AOL survey found that 20% of home computers were infected by a virus or worm and 80% had various forms of spyware and adware programs.
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A study from security vendor McAfee found that search query results returned by Google, AOL, and Ask.com are less likely to lead viewers to dangerous Web sites than they were six months ago. The study also found that Yahoo and MSN are not following that trend toward safer search results.
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Most consumers have no firewall protection, their antivirus software is outdated, and dozens of spyware programs secretly run on their computers, America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance found.
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In a MIT-Harvard study, 36 percent of subjects logged in to their online bank accounts despite being warned that the site was not secure.
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Most users think their computer is safe from adware and spyware--but they&#39;re wrong. A survey conducted by Internet service provider America Online found that 20 percent of home computers were infected by a
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Most users think their computer is safe from adware and spyware--but they're wrong.
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Careless security measures invite cybercrooks and scammers, researchers say.
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Feature-rich "smart phones" are proving to be nearly as dumb as personal computers when it comes to fending off viruses, hackers and other security headaches familiar to Internet users.
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(Source: Computerworld)  While virtually all businesses are proactively safeguarding their users with firewalls and antivirus software, nearly half of all organizations in the U.S. are doing nothing about Web filtering or blocking. And it is through the Web that the most potentially harmful and malicious threats can enter a computer system. The good news is that Web filtering solutions are effective, affordable, and available. And the iPrism solution from St. Bernard Software is getting particular attention these days from a fast-growing number of businesses, as users point out.
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A national study of US home computer users found many users have no idea their systems are infected with viruses or spyware, USA Today reported Monday.
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Those who have not changed the default passwords on their home routers may be putting themselves at risk of attack, researchers at Indiana University and Symantec are warning.
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People have long been the weakest link when it comes to protecting computers. The same applies to mobile phones, a security expert says.