Ozbon Articles

Today the BBC has been carrying the story about “Millions” being taken in by scareware scams, where pop-up ads on web pages tell people they’ve got a virus and to download ‘this antivirus software’ to fix it.  At best the ‘antivirus software’ is useless, and the person’s credit-card number is sold for use in credit-card fraud. At worst, the “anti-virus” actually contains viruses (virii?) and trojans that make the computer less secure, rather than more.

Now of course there are lots of idots out there who will fall for this kind of thing. But to my mind, it’s not just those people’s faults – both PC Manufacturers and ISPs need to take some of the responsibility too.

It doesn’t take a lot to get decent anti-virus software. Go to Grisoft, and get the free AVG anti-virus software (free for personal use) and job done. There’s plenty of others too – Kaspersky, Avast, so on, so forth.

But people still have to know about these, rather than using the frankly awful paid-for machine-killers like Norton, McAfee that come with most PCs and that people never use – or just assume that it’s installed, so Everything’s OK. They don’t know that they need to subscribe, and then make sure it’s updated automatically, and ideally daily.

So why don’t the ISPs supply a free antivirus like AVG, Avast or Kaspersky on the CD you invariably get? Why don’t PC builders install a free anti-virus with the PC rather than the ’subscribe for full use’ anti-virus software? There’s a school of thought that says the PC Builders like Dell et al. must get paid a decent amount by McAffee (or whoever) to put their paid-for software on the machines. And that’s all well and good, except that people don’t then pay for it – and why should they? – which is why there are plenty of machines out there vulnerable to these scareware attacks.

If computers were provided with free anti-virus that didn’t require any further financial investment or effort from Joe Everyday-User, there’d be a lot less problems of this sort.