Ingorant parents and the battle against malware

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In October of 2000 I assembled a computer for my parents who were looking to upgrade their old computer which was pentium MMX 200.

That machine I built I sit on right now typing this up. And I wonder how much longer until their carelesness on the internet makes them fall victim to identity theft or something else.

This afternoon I came upstairs to use the bathroom and found mom on the computer playing solitare while she waited for a web page to load.

I inquired as to how long she was waiting.

20 minutes she responded.

20 minutes??? Something ain't right... Task manager won't come up again when I do the three finger salute. Which is what was happening last night when I tried to use the computer.

I kick mom off and discover upon reboot that she got the computer infected with the same three malware programs I spent three hours removing last night! Even after I changed internet settings and told mom when the dialog box popped up asking to run/install controls to click "NO" no matter what.

I engaged my mom in the following conversation...

"Did you click 'yes' to any yes/no boxes?"

"Yes"

"Why!!"

"Becasue I wanted to see the webpage"

"Arrrgggg!! ! why did you do that"

"If a webpage has somekind of feature to it I want to be able to use it"

"Yea mom, but what if it's something bad?"

"What if it's not?"

I gave up in disgust, and then she was badgering me to fix the computer again to which I spent another 90 minutes doing

How in the world do I get through to someone who:

- Absolutely under any circumstance will not use anything but windows XP, IE, and Outlook express.

- Has no comprehension of how dangerous the internet is and will click yes to anything that pops up on the screen.

- Cannot understand how these programs get on the computer and then blames me for it.

- Zonealarm? What's Zonealarm......... Ohh, that's what Zonealarm does. So when it pops up a window I should click 'yes'?

I no longer feel safe having my parents using their own computer. And becasue of my mom, we have the worst possible combination of software to be using.

I can't wait until we get malware that imbeds itself into the system kernel. I'm suprised it hasn't happened yet. I look forward to the day where I have to do daily re-installs of XP for my parents just to get rid of malware

I agree with you about the clicking of "Yes"
and the slow booting(Malware?). At the dorm
setting we have this XP Desktop. It too takes
20 minutes to boot and the owner doesn't do
anything to fix it, this is why I use my mac to
go online when I am there on the desk.

Thanks for some insight,
Sincerely,
Ghosthunter

P.S....I suspect much spyware as well.

Scoots, you gotta switch to macs, we just don't have these problems, it doesn't happen.

He! He! Now imagine the same setup but in the workplace: You are the PC technician who is responsible for all the PC of the office and your mom is,... the vice-president !

That happened to me. Guess what ? I got fired ! I just couldn't shut up again, on the 3rd time, and i gave him s***. Oupss ....

It's tempting, it's very temping. But I'm tied down to a PC right now. When the time comes to get a new machine, I'll consider it greatly. I've heard nothing but good things about OS X.

I have nothing against Windows XP. In my opinion, Microsoft finally got it right with XP. Left on it's own I've had no problems with it despite the fact that it's 40+ million lines of code.

However when you take on it the internet, it's a whole different story. The hackers tear into it like the crusaders did to jerusalem in 1096.

Maybe if MS was ever brave to make windows an open source OS, maybe this thread would take on a different light.

OSX good? wellllll...I was happy with 8.6 and also with 9. They basically got their operating system right quite some versions ago, so any new OS is just twiddling around with something that already worked fine. OSX has better google functions, better 'history' recall, uh worse desktop personalisation options and a more annoying 'icon bar' (commonly used applications bunched together as icons on a moveable bar) thingy.

I remember OS 8 from high school. IMO Apple's much hyped "improved finder" was worse than the one that came with System 7.

And it crashed quite a bit too like system 7 did to me many times.

The first Mac OS I encounter was one of the system 6 version. I remember making all kinds of wierd desktop patterns in the control panel.

Oh god! that is old, in my Junior
College days the Classic(8mhz, 4mb ram,
40mb Hd) was brandnew for $999.

I really enjoy 9.1 and wouldn't recommend
9.2.1 . I find OSX.2 very good since it
has cool features, BUT X.1 & X.3 ARE INTERIM
OS's and would say that 9.x, X.2, X.4 all very
solid OS's. I would also say G4, but I like my
G3 because it never overheats. The G5 requires
a little bit of time for bugs to be resolved.

Hmmm?

From,
Ghosthunter

I used to prepare & print long inventory reports on an Apple 2+. Boy, I sure envied those people important enough to have a Mac Classic, with a hard drive, even!

Honestly, you should at least try convincing her to use Firefox, or, there might be a Firefox skin that resembles IE. I don't even know hot to use Outlook Express, how could your Mom figure it out? My brother used to click pop-ups and ads, then I convinced them that ads & pop-ups steal your money. BTW, Win98 is better than XP from what I've heard. It's what my computers have. What programs for detection do you use? I use:
Zone Alarm
Spybot Search & Destroy
Ad-Aware SE Personal

Hope I helped a little at least.

I wonder if your mother would even notice if you put Mozilla on instead of Internet Exploder.

Have you considered putting her into "kiosk" mode, using a virtual machine like VMWare, Lindows or BOCHS or maybe the Linux LTSP system?

Try setting up user accounts with security settings that won't allow them to load anthing new onto it. You may have to upgrade to XP Professional to do this.

http://pages.prodigy.net/zzxc/ieskin/

There! IE skin for FireFox. No one well know the difference once you change the desktop icon.

Get "Spyware Blaster" works like a charm for me.

I would also recommend Firefox if you are able to use it. I have been lucky enough to not have gotten infected ever since I became the only one to use this computer (and installed Spywareblaster)

I have spent several hours reformatting this computer, playing cat in mouse to remove it and I lose several files because of spyware/malware. So now I use the internet wisely and cautiously.

Last time there was a major infection was last fall when my mom went on a website and infected this computer with a whole mess of junk. I stayed home the next day and I basically spent the morning (6AM-9AM) reinstalling windows, drivers, etc and moving files. It was not fun.

I have these same problems with my mom. When ever something is not working I hear all the way from my computer room BEEEEEEEEENNNNN GET DOWN HERE NOW! The first thing she does is blame me or my brother for it. Even though I have my own computer and never use hers. My mom is better then my dad with computers though. Watching my dad screw around on the computer is like watching an ape try to perform open heart surgery .