Why is computer security such a problem for most people?
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
A little over a week ago, I spent a few hours with my good friend Andrew to help him renew his Apple certifications. We went to a really nice coffee cafe near White Rock Lake. While Andrew worked on his certifications, I used the free Wi-Fi to surf the web, and keep track of some auctions on eBay. While enjoying the free internet goodness, I noticed that several other customers in the cafe were using PCs with file sharing turned on. Out of curiosity, I clicked on a few of the PCs that were showing up on my Mac. Out of the 3 that were visible to my Mac, 2 had file sharing with guest access enabled. One had accounting information in an unsecured folder! Not wanting to violate someone’s privacy further, I did not open any of the files that I saw, but I did save a text file onto this person’s computer to let him/her know that I was able to get into their computer easily, without any trouble. This is actually something that I notice every time I am on a public Wi-Fi network at Starbucks, the airport, and a lot of other places with Wi-Fi. With all of the identity theft going around, why do so many people fail to do anything about securing their computers? (more…)
