Hacking Hindsight

Recently, I had several family members come to me with expressions like, "My computer is acting strangely," and, "I've been having a ton of adds pop up when I'm on the internet." I investigated and found that each computer had been infected by a virus through social engineering. Few hackers today have the technical skill to brute force their way through a firewall, but they have become adept at fooling people into inviting viruses in through the front door. I believe that much of the money that we invest in developing secure systems should be used to educate users on basic computer safety skills. Training people how to check links before clicking them and recognize phony emails or security warnings before responding to them would ruin the profession of social engineers. Hackers target people more than computers; therefore it is the user, not the software, that merits our greatest effort reinforce. We must remedy our pervasive computer security ignorance. If we do not, our computers will continue to easily fall victim to cyber attacks.