-----Original Message----- From: Remko Lodder [mailto:remko@elvandar.org] Sent: January 29, 2004 12:43 PM To: Vivien M.; 'Jason Lixfeld' Cc: doug@nanog.con.com; nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: [Nanog] RE: MS is vulnerable

It's better to educate your mum how she keeps windows secure. It can be done, there are a lot of Windows machine in the wild out there that are actually almost up to date, (everyone should be that far),

I've managed to educate my dad on the critical updates. He's better at it than me, actually - when the little icon shows up in the taskbar, he knows that he's supposed to click on it and do what it tells him to do. Then again, my dad also takes his car to the dealer the day after he gets a recall letter, so perhaps he's just more responsible than many... My mom's, though, tends to have the little icon staying in the tray, unless I'm visiting... but I'm still working on educating her :) Much easier to convince her to click that icon than to make her hand over her American Express for a shiny new iBook, anyways.

let her run antivirus software, update it frequently, learn her how to handle unknown email, how to handle weird attachments, delete mails who look suspicious, install a decent windows firewall that allows you to select what should be openend and what should be closed (windows own firewall might be in help her)

Antivirus software, these days, updates itself. If you run the home/SOHO Norton line, I believe that was added in the 2002 version - the 2001 reminded you to run LiveUpdate, but you actually had to go through the wizards and stuff each time. No more, now it updates itself and just pops up a little thingy saying it did so. The big problem with "weird attachments" is that they seem to come from a trusted sender. The usual excuse is "but Joe wouldn't send me a virus", and it's very hard to make people understand that some computer out there, not even necessarily Joe's, is sending a virus in Joe's name without Joe knowing about it. At least these days, viruses aren't MS Word documents, which helps... No need for firewalls - I continue to maintain a FreeBSD firewall system at my parents' house, and I trust it a lot more than I'd trust a personal firewall. I'm weary about personal firewalls, though, because sometimes their interface causes problems (and a _properly_ locked down box shouldn't need one): eg, one relative who somehow got Norton's firewall to block outbound IE. Not easy to fix over the phone... Vivien -- Vivien M. vivienm@dyndns.org Assistant System Administrator Dynamic Network Services, Inc. http://www.dyndns.org/