Each year, tens of thousands of people will be injured or killed in automobile accidents. The costs in terms of personal loss and financial burdens is enormous. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports, "In 2006, 42,642 people were killed in the estimated 5,973,000 police-reported motor vehicle traffic crashes, 2,575,000 people were injured, and 4,189,000 crashes involved property damage. " They report the estimated cost of motor vehicle crashes in the year 2000 alone was over $230 billion (source: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov). When one considers the emotional impact the intangible costs go much higher. Of course there is an obvious solution to preventing these deaths, costs, and injuries in your own life: leave your car in the garage.
What does this have to do with computing you might ask? As with your automobile, there's one, extremely easy method for increasing your computing safety and security (paraphrasing Microsoft engineer Charles Fitzgerald): unplug your computer from the internet. No other method has proven as effective at removing risk, reducing spam, preventing viruses, and protecting your personal data.
Unfortunately, a computer unplugged from the internet can be about as useful as, well, a fine automobile that only drives up and down the driveway. For most of us, safety and security are important but not so primary that we would be willing to sacrifice the ability to be online in order to absolutely ensure it. Like driving, when we're computing, we want to do what we can to ensure we're in the safest situation we can afford without so restricting our experience that we either no longer enjoy it or are no longer able to do it effectively.
Computer manufacturers both in the hardware and software space are working feverishly to create safer computer systems. One of the key selling points for Windows Vista and Apple's OSX are their security subsystems. The Linux crows constantly trumpet the security built into their OS as a key reason to switch to that platform. The support services built around keeping systems secure is growing too. IDC forecasts that the Web security market will grow from $1.2 billion in 2006 to $2.3 billion in 2011 (this is just the software market -- the overall spend in terms of personnel, hardware, loss recovery and the like is much higher) (source: IDC). So there is much work and effort being put into making the machines that connect to the internet safer.
But there's another side to the story that isn't talked about much: the user. Just as no automobile will protect an unsafe driver, computer safety has a lot to do with you and me. I will be writing a series of articles under the broad title "Defensive Browsing." I want to talk about a set of behaviors and practices that will help keep you safe and secure while online without sacrificing a satisfying online experience. I'll discuss how to use the internet security tools designed to keep you safe and secure but also how to avoid needing them in the first place. In order to provide a thorough approach to the topic, I'll spend some time talking about how the internet works and provide a little history of the internet and computing with the goal of giving the reader a broader understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. I'll then talk about some simple practices every user can employ to keep safe online. Throughout the series we'll look at the wide variety of tools available while focusing on the basics of safe online practices so the tools become the safety net rather than the first line of defense.
The Defensive Browsing series of articles are:
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