Gavin, 17 March 05
The Home Office can claim to have been busy recently and maybe some things have been left on the back burner, but there is no point in attempting to set up a security advisory site without putting in some effort to keep it up to date. ITSafe does not increase my confidence in the government’s grasp on IT security when it states that ‘No Bulletins have been identified since the ITsafe launch’. (Secunia – and other respected and established security monitors have put out over a hundred advisories in that time).
Some of the advice is laughable – a few parts are bordering on the dangerous. Somewhere along the line someone has made that simple mistake of confusing plain english and patronising english: ‘Every day new dangers emerge from the Internet that can attack your computer and take all the information on it. This can allow the bad guys to steal anything they want…’
The information about ActiveX merely states: ‘This is a technology that allows extra features to be added to specific programs (such as web browsers).’ – No warning of the potential for malware, though here ITSafe is a bit confused on that whole subject: ‘Adware is generally safe,’ the site informs us, ‘and does not affect your computer in a bad way…’
Reading what ITSafe has to say about executable files might make you feel safer: ‘an executable file is a program that runs on your computer when it is opened… On Windows they are recognised by the extension .exe … next time you receive an attachment that ends .exe, think twice before opening it.’
Which misses the point as many other executable extensions (scr, pif, bat) are widely used to get users to run viruses and whatever ‘thinking twice’ is supposed to entail it really doesn’t amount to a robust defence strategy from the bad guys.
My favourite part of the site though is the attempt to represent the internet graphically. Hats off to the Home Office designer that has so magnificently managed this.
