Today, I was scheduled to go to the Gallatin Public Library to offer free tutoring services to their patrons. They were supposed to sign up for 1 hour blocks and my understanding is these services are asked for commonly throughout the year but unfortunately nobody signed up for tutoring while I was there.
I did overhear some older women discussing malware and spyware and was pleased to hear that they had gone to Best Buy’s Geek Squad for help and Geek Squad had helped them set up file backups and explained how to make sure their files were being backed up. One interesting thing I gathered from the discussion was that the victim thought the malware came from an Adobe update. Those “in the know” know she was probably fooled by an ad claiming to be an update but in her mind it was Adobe that caused the problems. This enlightened me to a reason that some people are hesitant to keep their software up to date, which only makes malware and adware problems worse.
She seemed to not have been trained out of whatever behavior caused her to get in trouble in the first place because she applauded the software’s ability to wait until it was cleaned off by techs and then wait until she got home to reinfect her machine. Sure, it’s possible this is what happened but it’s more likely that she repeated the behavior and got re-infected or that the system was not fully cleaned in the first place. I told her about ad blocking software and showed her how much cleaner the Internet looked with it vs. without it. I explained to her that ad blockers not only block annoying advertisements, they keep her safe by blocking these fake update announcements.
I gave her a handwritten link to the not-yet-posted article on this site with instructions on how to install an ad blocker in her web browser. I told her it would be up by the time she got home.
