Pretending threats don't exist is not the answer, especially when it comes to malware
The 18-year-old daughter thinks I'm paranoid. When I tell her it's dangerous out there and she needs to be always alert to possible attacks, she shrugs, convinced I'm not only wrong, I'm mental.
She ignores me when I tell her to log off when she's finished using the computer. And
to always turn it off at night.
Don't leave the notebook power adaptor on all the time - these things get hot and have been known to cause fires, not to mention wear out prematurely.
"Whatever," she says.
Yet when something goes wrong, I'm lumped with fixing the notebook battery that's burned out.
Or enduring online help desk hell to sort out problems with her wretched Facebook. Not to mention regularly doing the backups and taking out the virus nasties.
Such is the lot of 21st century man - providing for his family, not so much as man the hunter, but more as man the geek. I am nerd, hear me roar.
Even though I do my best to protect the family - my antivirus software automatically updated, my firewall meticulously set, plus separate anti-spyware scanning - I do wonder about the futility of it all.
Malware - bits of web-based software doing bad things - is ubiquitous and indefatigable. No matter how many I nuke, another always arises to take its place.
The home computer was hit by a particularly nasty piece of work last month - of a class of malware I'd not battled before. They're known as rogue anti-virus products, or "scareware".
The one that attacked our home, calling itself XP Antimalware, seemed convincing on first glance.
Pretending to scan our computer and then telling us we had 25 infections, it looked liked a legitimate function of Windows Security.
My first response to anything mysterious like this is to do an internet search under the name or symptoms. But this tricky beast was one step ahead and blocked the browser with another alarming message - claiming our clean computer was infected with both a Trojan and a keylogger.
Very bad. It then threw up a web page warning that the site I was trying to get to - a site that explained the scam, as it happens - "may pose a security threat to your system". Dastardly.
The purpose of all this was to try and scare me into buying the fake software - in the process handing over credit card details. It's big business in the cyber underworld where you can earn serious money, if you know what you're doing.
As security expert Brian Krebs reported recently, one "business" going by the name Avprofit pays "affiliates" roughly US$1000 ($1420) for every 1000 times they trick hapless computer users into installing such rogue anti-virus and security products.
Not only did the malware break through my anti-virus and anti-spyware defences, it was also persistent and difficult to clean out - frequently popping up with its scaremongering messages.
If you get infected by such a thing I can thoroughly recommend Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware (www.malwarebytes.org).
I tried to educate the daughter about malware. It didn't go well. I told her that one of the vectors for these sorts of rogue applications is her beloved Facebook.
That there had been a recent wave of bogus "stalking" applications promising to reveal who's been looking at your Facebook profile.
Rogue apps with names such as peeppeep-pro, profile-check-online and stalk-my-profile. And that what the apps actually do is give cyber crims access to your Facebook, your friends and all the personal information your settings allow them to see. She just looked at me as though I was from another planet.
