Lesley Stahl | 03/26/2009 5:00 pm
On '60 Minutes': Viruses, Worms and Your Computer (Video)
I have something scary for you this week on "60 Minutes": viruses and worms. I’m not talking about real pests; I’m talking about digital viruses and worms. My segment is about malicious software that attacks our computers. What did I learn from this report? Enough to make me stop doing my banking online. I also learned more about the hackers – they’re usually young, male and from Russia.
Watch me on "60 Minutes" this Sunday to find out more about all of this — and also how to protect yourself.
Watch the preview:
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Also on "60 Minutes" this Sunday, Bob Simon reports on African lions and Steve Kroft profiles basketball superstar LeBron James.
"60 Minutes" airs on CBS Sunday at 7 PM ET/PT.
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25 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment
Manual updating is the safest way, and if you have Windows, download Windows Defender - MS has little to gain in jeopardizing their users security.
At the same time, some AVs will not be as effective when there are 2 running. Might use Trendmicro.com as a 2nd run option online. I was ridding a friend’s system (1 year old!) of 10s of Trojans and 9 viruses, and One Care could not remove 2 of them, but Trendmicro’s Housecall got them right away. (Just look for Home User or "residential" on their site, and click on Fee Scan, and wait …
Also, don’t go to links you see in chats, newsgroups, etc and Facebook, and UTube, etc are loaded. If your AV’s running well (Avira, or AVG in that order are sufficient), and you have the updated AdAware, and Spyware Blaster, you should get an alarm loud and clear if there’s a coming danger. Malwarebytes Antimalware is another good bet. Check into your MS securiety newsgroups, too. If you use OE they can be brought in to your OE email, easily, as "Newsgroups."
BRAVO, Lizzie - y ou’re on the ball. Avast is rated higher than AVG but AVG is fine, and since you keep it updated, it’s just become less user friendly than it use to be. Heavens - anything is better than that danged Nortons - in truth, beging absolutely realistic, most freeware is a form of malware … they make money off their sales products, but do send our data ‘out’ to help them sustain costs, however, its up to us to keep our "data" under our control. It’s always prudent to create a passphrase, and password any documents you don’t want anyone else to see/read/sell - for writers this is critically important.
Many of us, including myself, will spend time obtaining our International Serial Rights but leave our computers wide open. That is not very smart. If you look at www.hushmail.com it will show you how to create a passphrase (or contact me and I’ll help you). Hushmail is designed with PGP security, the top Internet secrurity in the world, designed by Zimmerman when he was at MIT. Their links on designing passphrases is well worth the time and read.
Well, the wowowow.com site keeps trying to plant Amazon.com cookies on my harddrive, so let’s get realy here, Lesley. This site does more than that, too, and I’m heavily walled off, and know when each of my ports open (not without my doing it, though). I won’t even permit auto updates to occur on my system, although at times, it takes hours to find those pesky files in programs. Anything Adobe is the worst, along with WMP.
Once we stop permitting "trusted sites" to update ad lib, we’ll all be safer on the net.
Just don’t ever put anything online that you don’t want on a billboard.
Suggest that he put a desktop extension from your Temp Internet Files folder so you can erase them a couple of times a day. Do not ever try to keep your logins on any website, enter them each time you sign on, then erase all of their "cookies," etc. Most are marketing gimmicks, but we do have to be careful. When I sign on here, and on to Yahoo, I get at least 30, including those from companies I never "went near," and that irks me. For example, the Horoscope here is always planted on my computer, and I have never visited that link. Best to be careful, Sharon … and they say in W Texas, don’t walk on the land you don’t trust. ;-))