Like most people who haven’t been to a college or university for many years, I am saddened to see year on year the continual decline in the educational standards. It beggars belief how living in Britain, one of the most prosperous nations on the planet we have young adults leaving schools not being able to read or write properly.

It seems that the ‘yooth’ are well versed in the dangers of ecstacy but don’t know how to spell it. Which generally isn’t perceived as a problem as they’re responsible for creating a whole new language which is communicated via text messages.

Worryingly though, these are the exact people who use computers quite frequently. So them not being able to spell explains why I get visitors coming to my website whereas they just wanted to go to myspace.

Presumably this group of can’t understand or choose not to try to understand warning messages that pop up on their computer screen telling them their firewall has detected some anomaly, that the websites certificate is invalid, or that the anti-virus is out of date. They’ve just figured out that clicking ‘yes’ or ‘ok’ shuts the annoying box down and allows them to continue.

These people are asked for their opinions regarding online security and are equally considered as much as say Bruce Schneier or Philip Zimmerman.

Which is why market research means nothing to me. I mean there are so many different websites and publications which give you the must have statistics such as:

ID fraud hits 1 in 10 Brits
79% of businesses make no effort to destroy sensitive information
Card not present fraud is now the largest type of card fraud in the UK and acounts for nearly 50% of all card fraud losses reaching over £200m
UK Cash machine fraud Jan-Jun 08 was up 22% to 20.8m
Phone. Internet and mail order fraud up 18% to a staggering 161.9m for the first half of 2008

Now these stats have as much interest to me as I am interested in how amicably Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce each other.

The one thing all these stats fail to mention, is how exactly these frauds are occuring in the first place. I mean we can deduce from the figures that it takes a lot of people to collectively lose over 100m in fraud. Its like they just logged on one day to their online banking system to find someone had transferred all their money to a bank in Bermuda.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for the banks in this regard. There are obviously whiny illiterate young customers who demand the bank reimburse their losses when they’ve been as responsible with their online habits as they have been in chosing their sex partners. Just because a few pills cleared up a bout of chlamydia it doesn’t make it alright to carry on with bad computing practises.

A few years ago I fractured a couple of ribs and was laid up at home for a couple of weeks. My wife needed som money. Not wanting to suffer the pain of having to go to the bank, I lent her my debit card along with my PIN number. It was probably the painkillers which clouded my judgement. But needless to say, I was about £50 over-drawn by the end of the month. But I don’t blame my wife. It was my fault, I deserved it and lucky to get away with a light bruising of £50.

If the stats say there were half a million online bank accounts hacked last year – I say that’s a half million examples of people being stupid and careless

cynic@infosec-cynic.com