Security begins at home

Yesterday was Make IT Secure Day (you mean you didn't know?) which has the laudable aim of educating Irish PC users about how to protect their computers from virus, hackers and spyware.

How could you be against the campaign (unless you're a hacker)? Of course you couldn't when the Government-sponsored message has been sensibly boiled down to three key measures:

1) Use up-to-date antivirus software

2) Install a firewall

3) Update your operating system

To which you could quite easily add:

4) Don't use Internet Explorer, a buggy magnet for spyware and hackers

5) Consider changing to alternative, less targeted operating systems such as Linux or Mac

But the Make It Secure campaign could hardly do that when one of the heavyweights on board is Microsoft, which wouldn't take kindly to the trashing of its already risible record on security.

Actually, this has all the hallmarks of a Microsoft PR exercise, discreetly pushing its message that it's lazy Windows users who are the problem, not the people who created the flawed software in the first place.

(It's not exactly a smoking gun but a downloadable PDF version of the advice is called "Microsoft Security Booklet".)

Thus, all the papers this morning ignored that angle and faithfully reported instead that workers were putting their company computers at risk because of their ignorance of the dangers of the big bad internet.

Nice going.