Just took me over the edge!
Through no fault of their own (or maybe just a liitle) my brother in law got, what we at first thought was a virus on their pc. It’s a little strange as i know they keep their virus definitions up todate, they need to really as it’s their business pc. Off i trot to fix it, what i found blew my stack.
Ok so it wasn’t a virus, at first i thought it was due to the pop ups that showed it was infected with some pretty savage beasties. Funny thing was no body knew what XP ANTIVIRUS PRO was, it’s not something that we’ve installed? Trusty google to the rescue, it was bloody malware. Somehow it was installed on their machine and started everytime you started a web browser or did anything internet related. Took me about an hour of research and cleaning…..major suckage.
I left them happy campers with a clean working machine.
So what did i do next? Well i went home, backed up my laptop and removed the Vista installed that i dual boot fedora with. Surely MS can do something better currently to prevent this? I’m not sure if it’s Windows that is so crap for allowing this, or that the malware/virus writers are just good at integrating their code with it? Is it down to education as well, do we need to better teach people on how to use their pc? Teach them about social engineering yada yada yada. Needless to say i’ve removed vista from my laptop and have it totally dedicated to Fedora.
Now comes the shout “Why didn’t you tell them about Fedora?” Actually i did, but it’s not something they could use. They have too many packages that they need that are windows only, i suppose i could find or code workarounds, but that would take time…..
Bloody Windows, Bloody Malware, Bloody Virus Writers…..
AV software is failing to detect much malware, these days: http://thepcsecurity.com/latest-security-software-cannot-detect-zeus-virus/
Give them malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware too, and they might stand a fighting chance.
The root causes are all the things you describe; bugs being an economic externality for Microsoft, only to be addressed if they threaten Microsoft’s reputation, increasingly valuable economic incentives for attackers as more and more financial transactions are performed online, and users not naturally “thinking like an attacker” and trusting the wrong things online (e.g. scareware).
There’s no hope when people clicks in a “readme.exe” attachment.
I agree that Windows does some things wrong, but at the end of the day it weights more the fact that the user barely has knowledge to make the most basic tasks.
Using Fedora you have both more security (by default) and an user that tends to learn things without effort (as far as you’re able to read the screen dialogs, of course). Thats a matter of fact: all the switchers win->lin I know, they agree that they know now more about his computer and how things work, without stop doing their tasks.
I don’t know why’s this, but I’ve seen it so many times. In fact, when one of these switchers has to go back to windows after a couple of months… it’s really a pain for them!
I love linux on my servers, but I’ve got to remphasize Juanjo’s point. If you were logged in as root in your Fedora installation clicking pop ups without discretion there isn’t a lot protecting you either… “obscurity” I suppose.
The fault most likely lies more with your BIL’s lack of discretion rather than M$’s 8 year old OS (Current versions have better measures in place against PEBKACs).
I often enjoy reading your posts on Planet Fedora. Thanks for blogging!