Hackers Target Teens and Young Surfers

Quote: "Recently I put four Windows 7 systems, fully patched and updated, with current anti-virus, through the most difficult security test that I could imagine: I unleashed seven teenagers upon them."......
https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/7604-Hackers-Target-Teens-and-Young-Surfers.html

 

@ Dermot7

Interesting experiment, which backs up my own findings, over at least the past 5 - 10 years, on how Most teenagers surf = Don't give a **** =

Sounds like they running in Admin ? Still, even if they were with the above OS and apps i would have expected much better protection, obviously not =

 

From what I can tell of my friends and myself (I'm 15) almost all of us have admin priveleges. And many of my friends have got infected in the last 6 months, since they randomly send me malicious links in IM clients. I don't think the most of them could infect a machine in two hours though. It's soon 4 years since I was last infected, I started reading about security after discovering that my computer had 13 trojans and a rootkit And have never been infected again after cleaning them.

It's good that some software decide about these things automatically.

However, many of the teenagers here know about security just as much as their parents do (= nothing). About a year ago my father clicked a random ad while searching something in Google, got redirected to a malicious FakeAV site and clicked "yes" when prompted to download the FakeAV (he just wanted to continue his surfing without caring about any alerts, clicking "OK" "yes" "allow" etc. without even reading anything). Kaspersky blocked it though. I don't think the hackers are specially targeting teens.

 

Most likely those are the people that say that Windows is unsecure . It's also funny that the first reaction to that article is "install Linux", which will not solve the problem (like all the OSX users that came from Windows saying they are now "immune" to viruses).

 

What was the anti-malware software that failed to protect these machines?

 

+1
I don't find that answer myself.

 

Personally I think they do this same thing with adults, I feel the were kinda mean to say teens saying they are the cause of many infections

(Thoughts from one of the teens that does not get infected as soon as he goes online)

 

Yes, but you are using Panda, the other teens don't

 

It may not be "fair" to single out teens, but it's the truth, they are more likely to get hit. If you ever looked around MySpace when it was in its heyday, you would have seen why. It was like walking into a store filled with open diaries, there was nothing most of them wouldn't talk about. Teens also are the ones that jump right in when "that new, totally cool P2P service" is found...that nobody knows a thing about and didn't have one bit of press. Teens are the guinea pigs for new internet tech in general. They start using some new fad, and, sooner or later, we old folk get a hold of it and it becomes a hot thing to do.

@Swex: Please don't start name dropping vendors, this thread will never make it out alive.

 

The way they make it sounds it most adults are better at security compared to teens. Sure most adults are not out downloading games yet most of the time I see a major of adults being infected via P2P (normally infected crack files) or through social networks (not just teens are there clicking links). In my personal opinion they should really do a study and set a few different age ranges. Such as select x amount of people in the ranges 7-13,14-19-20 and up and compare their usage of the PC. Tell them to surf and download whatever they want and then compare the results and the end.

Personally to make it a little better set them up with a AV that will automatically handle web blocking and malware removal which is what I see on most peoples machine that way they have no choice on what to allow and what to block.

 

I accept that the title of this thread might be a little inaccurate or misleading. Rather than "targeting" perhaps should have highlighted the supposed greater likelihood of young surfers' machines becoming infected. I don't think the author intends to insult, or make a "blanket" judgement on young users.
But reality is undeniable. Perhaps a valid parallel might be the greater likelihood
of young auto-drivers being involved in a crash/wreck. Hence higher insurance
premiums for this age-group.
Experience(usually) brings expertise and capability("once bitten..etc").
And there are exceptions to virtually every scenario, therefore I would say that Ibrad's approach to computer security is exceptional, rather than commonplace, for Ibrad's age-group.
A possible value of this "research" might be to highlight the need for security professionals to have a greater focus on "free games downloads" and these sort of "lures", in their efforts to thwart the baddies.