Hello. My name is Bryant Sandburg. I live in a gorgeous rural setting in northern New York State, not far from the St. Lawrence River. The nearest big city is Ottawa, Ontario, an hour’s drive away. I retired from a career in advertising and marketing at the end of 2001, and immediately started a home business.
I started this blog because our society is being attacked through our computers. I wanted to become informed about this growing and ever-evolving threat, and how to protect myself and my family, and to help others do the same.
I am not a security expert. No certifications; no tech degrees or training. I am a tool user, not a tool maker.
I bought my first computer in 1978, an Apple II, after I saw a demonstration of Visicalc, the granddaddy of all spreadsheets. It was the first time I ever saw an electronic spreadsheet and I was hooked instantly. What a fantastic tool that was! I was a business owner and I had a cautious banker who wanted quarterly financial reports and forecasts. My partner and I would spend whole days working up these “pro-formas” on big spreadsheets. Visicalc changed this dreaded task into a genuine planning tool that was actually fun to use. It impressed the heck out of our banker, too.
When the Internet came along I jumped right in. I was even a part owner of an ISP for a while, until hackers put us out of business. That was in the late 90s, when hackers broke in and erased files and destroyed operating systems just because they could. Of course, that interrupted our service and the restoration and recovery cost thousands of dollars each time these malicious pranksters broke through our expensive security systems.
That was my first experience with hackers.
By 2004, the hacker community had begun to change. Hackers had found ways to make money by breaking into home computers and those of small businesses. The “botnet” had been born. Hackers could take control of an owner’s PC silently and secretly and make it part of a network. These networks became known as “botnets,” each comprised of thousands of PCs. The hackers monetized these assets by renting them out to spammers. The fee could be thousands of dollars a month, depending on the size of the botnet.
Which brings me to my next encounter with a hacker.
I checked email one morning and found my inbox flooded with notices of “undeliverable” mail. Many dozens of them. It was all spam email that had bounced. My name was in the Sender header, even though I had not sent a single one of those messages. The spammer had somehow screwed up and the undeliverables came back to me instead of being routed to a catch file controlled by the hacker. Otherwise, I may never have discovered that my machine had been hijacked.
That’s when I really became interested in Internet Security. I had long been a Norton anti-virus customer, and I had downloaded two different anti-spyware programs. The guy who built my PC told me that was all I needed.
Well, that kind of protection software is child’s play for a hacker who knows what he’s doing. And there are millions of them out there. Thousands are employed by organized crime. Other thousands are members of terrorist jihad organizations.
Sadly, most PC owners who connect to the Internet (and there are now more than a billion of them on the planet; more than 250-million in North America alone) are blithely unaware of the threat: its various forms; the many different criminal and terrorist elements and their motivations, expertise and sophisticated use of technology.
These are very bad people.
Your brother-in-law, son-in-law, or even your neighborhood PC systems expert is no match for these people. Like my PC builder friend, they know just enough to be dangerous. Experts with the Windows operating systems, but not about security.
The bad news is that no security system is hacker-proof. The hackers are smart, motivated, and innovative. Even the Pentagon has been hacked.
But not often. And every attack on a major target makes it stronger, because these targets are protected by the world’s best security technologies and IT security specialists. Your bank doesn’t buy its anti-virus and anti-spyware software at Wal-Mart or BestBuy.
The standalone software package, or even some of the new security “suite” packages are simply not up to the task. They rely on techniques such as signature recognition that hackers have learned to defeat. The better and tougher security technologies used by enterprise (government agencies, corporations, financial institutions, etc.) can’t be delivered as a software package. Enterprise grade security is layered and overlapping and managed by in-house teams of security professionals.
That’s what we consumers and small business owners need. Managed Internet Security: the same technology the big boys use and a team of professionals to manage it for us and watch our backs.
I found such a solution. And that’s the second reason I started this blog. I want as many people as possible to know about this solution. It’s not being written about in the general press or in magazines devoted to the PC user community. The company behind this solution doesn’t advertise. Instead, it markets through independent representatives. It’s not MLM.
Full disclosure: I’ve been one of those representatives for more than 5 years. I do have a business interest in writing this blog, as well as the desire to make more people aware of the dangers on the Internet. Cynics may say that my motives are therefore not pure. So be it. I subscribe to the concept that you can do well by doing good. And if I help one person avoid identity theft or even one expensive trip to a computer repair shop, that’s good.