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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Guide Weather Subscribe Contact Us March 5, 2005 On Computers Be cautious, but don't be scared Michael J. Himowitz When I sat down at my PC to begin this column, the first thing I noticed was a new message from Microsoft's anti-spyware program. While I was gone, it had spent 19 minutes scanning 1,899 memory processes, 48,627 files on my hard drive and 8,442 keys in my Windows registry. Spyware threats detected: zero. Then, as usual, I checked the log of my Norton Antivirus program. It hadn't found anything worthy of suspicion. Next came ZoneAlarm, the firewall that protects my computer from real-time Internet burglars. Nothing more than the usual snoopers. For me this has become a routine, just another sign that we live in an age of digital anxiety - which might be entirely justified and might not. The news certainly looks bad enough. Late last week, security researchers announced the first mass-distributed virus had turned up in U.S. cell phones. Known as Cabir, it spreads through the short-range, Bluetooth wireless system that the industry devised as an easy way to connect computers, printers, cell phones and other gadgets. It's easy, all right. This virus doesn't do much damage: Mainly it runs down cell phone batteries in a ceaseless search for other Bluetooth-enabled cell phones. But the next one might not be so benign - and we know for sure now that virus writers have an additional 1.5 billion targets. That's how many people carry cell phones worldwide. A few days after the Bluetooth scare, the FBI warned that hackers were distributing a virus masquerading as e-mail from the agency itself. Bearing an fbi.gov address, the message warns recipients that they've visited an illegal Web site and orders them to open an attachment containing a list of questions. When they comply, they get something worse than the third degree from an electronic G-man - they get a virus. That, by the way, was the day after the hacked contents of Paris Hilton's mobile phone address book were posted on the Web. It was great grist for the gossip column snicker mill, but not much fun for the folks in her address book - famous and not so - who were bombarded by prank phone calls and e-mail. It's certainly not much fun for other customers of T-Mobile, the cell phone provider that pays Ms. Hilton to promote its products. It turned out, coincidentally, that someone had hacked T-Mobile's servers and made off with the personal information from at least 400 accounts. OK, I get paid to pay attention to this kind of thing. Is the online world really that dangerous? Or has my addiction to tech headlines made me paranoid? Some people would undoubtedly vote for the loony bin. One of them is Larry Seltzer, author of PC Magazine's online Security Watch column. In an article entitled "Five Years after the End of the World" that appeared in the latest print version, he notes that January 1 marked the fifth anniversary of Y2K - the disaster that never was. For those who missed this milestone, Y2K is an abbreviation for Jan. 1, 2000, the day the world's computer systems were supposed to crash. That's because a generation of lazy programmers had used only two digits to record the year in all the arithmetic that calculated dates. When the clock ticked over to 2000, all those computers would think it was 1900 - and millions of them would go bananas. Banks would fail, the power would go out, planes would crash. Such was the prediction from the doomsayers, and I admit that I joined the chorus - in more measured tones, of course. The Y2K disasters never happened - a least not on any measurable scale. But Seltzer argues that today's headlines about viruses, worms, spyware, trojan horses, phishing scams, identity thefts and other evil artifacts of the online age promote much the same hysteria as publicity over Y2K. He and others are worried that too many people will buy into this gloom and doom and abandon or seriously curtail online activities which, for the most part, have improved all our lives. His take on Y2K history: "Don't believe everything the experts tell you, and be especially skeptical of worst-case predictions for technology." That's good advice, but as judges say, I concur in part and dissent in part. One reason Y2K wasn't a disaster was that programmers and equipment took the warnings seriously - if a bit belatedly - and worked furiously to fix their systems before the new millennium. If the information technology folks at The Baltimore Sun hadn't spent man-years working on Y2K, we would simply have stopped publishing. Ask any technology officer from any business, government or educational institution who was around at the time. They'll tell you the same thing. On the other hand, before you buy into hysteria over any batch of bad news, take a deep breath and look into the details. For example, the new cell phone virus only affects only the latest generation of so-called SmartPhones that run the Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems. To spread from one phone to another wirelessly, both phones have to have Bluetooth capability, and they have to pass within 15 to 20 feet of one another. Hardly the recipe for mass infection, and if you do have a potentially vulnerable Bluetooth phone, you can eliminate it by turning off the broadcast function it uses to advertise its presence to others. The FBI virus? That should be a bad joke by now. The only thing that makes it different from hundreds of others is its faked FBI source address. Which is hardly believable - the agency communicates with suspects by sending a couple of serious guys with gray suits and crew cuts - not sending e-mail. This spoof was just another message with an attachment from a stranger. No one should ever open one of those attachments. And poor Paris (now there's an oxymoron). It turned out her phone itself, or her online account, probably was hacked by someone who knew her password, or guessed it because it was too easy to figure out. Almost all of these horror stories illustrate very minor risks for anyone who takes even the most elementary precautions - such as guarding a password or ignoring e-mail attachments. And those threats that couldn't be anticipated are relatively easy to address. So don't hide under a chair - just make sure you're online safely. Update your virus checker, use a firewall, and don't click on anything in an e-mail or pop-up ad if you don't know where it came from. And if you're looking for 5-year-old cans of baked beans and SpaghettiO's, I still have a few in my basement. Never can tell when that Y2K stash will come in handy. DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Slippers Women's & Men's Slippers Ceramic Piggy Banks heloc libor rate Calenders 2005 Calender 2005 Accelerate Weightloss Products Memory Foam Mattress afsa studentloans home equity loans teleconferencing W2 Forms fasa student loans Matchmaking & Dating Scripts African Safari Conference Calls - $50/Month Security Systems student loan consolidation wholesale diamonds Currancy Exchange web conferencing Online Casinos Community Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams