A farcical situation arose in the UK on Monday this week when the National Crime Agency gave advice to people to wake up to security and referred them to its web site – which crashed under the strain.
Coincidentally, we were on our way to a Dell security conference in Budapest, where folk were warning of dire consequences for everyone from end users to corporations if they didn’t put locks that work on their internet front doors.
The tech jargon for this is a “firewall”, but Dell security personnel – many of whom worked for SonicWALL before it was bought by the company – work night and day to react to ever present security threats.
Dell logs millions of malware attacks every day and it’s evident that while the security problems are omnipresent and apply from government networks to your own home LAN, no-one is really listening to the essential message.
You would probably never leave your front door open but it seems that now we’re locked into using the interweb, many of us do just that – whether we’re using a smarty pants phone, a tablet, or a Windows PC or a Macintosh for that matter.
Patrick Sweeney, executive director of product management at Dell Software told me that part of the problem is people don’t understand the risks they run. That’s as true for individuals as it is for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and obviously for corporations too.
And if you think you’re safe with an Android operating system, well you’d better think again – especially if you charge your smarty phone from your Windows PC.
Sweeney says there is no coordinated strategy worldwide for what he terms criminal-to-criminal networks. Reading between the words he said, I got the firm impression that any kind of strategy is as far away as reality as Arcturus is from our sun. His colleagues tell me that there is no coordinated strategy even within the European Union – Brussells doesn’t have much of a clue about security.
But as we’re all linked together by the internet of thongs, it surely is about time that the United Nations started knock knock knocking on countries’ doors? Or even the European Union. Or even North America. Or even the United Kingdom.
Sweeney said you are comparatively safe if you’re not connected to the internet but as many of us now all are, and are being encouraged to buy stuff even on our smarty phones and tablets, perhaps we had better start bugging our politicians to get a bit smart themselves.
* You can find ChannelEye's coverage of the channel conference by clicking here.