The elderly need to become more tech savvy in this dangerous contemporary world – Part 2

To many of the elderly, the very real online threat from roving gangs of online marauders is, by comparison, just a funny story told by their overwrought offspring. Kids play videogames and talk of foreign hackers and pretend to be smart but actually they
are because they are into tech world since birth.

Now-a-days entire nation states are engaging in cybercrime as a way to raise money. Recently Egypt, Iran and the US fell victim to the cyber-hacking. Billion-dollar organized crime syndicates are using Ph.D.-level hackers to develop technical algorithms
and try out new forms of social engineering. Phishing and identity theft are at an all-time high.

The middle age demographic knows there is a risk of internet crime. They do their best to protect themselves, but they know full-well that nothing is really enough. Even so, they do their regular updates, check bank balances daily, update virus definitions,
scan their machines, run risky software in virtual machines, read sites like ZDNet and respond to zero-day threats. They do their best but even then they are at risk all the time as the hackware and malware is always evolving.

But the elderly don’t seem to get that the threats today are very different from the threats they’ve known all their lives. The elderly are enormous targets of opportunity for criminals.

This worries techies deeply. In today’s modern world, it’s not practical for seniors to live without the Internet. They can do their best to set up firewalls. They can try to move some people off Windows to, say, the iPad (or, yes, Linux). They can try to
teach as much as possible, but many of the elderly seem unwilling to learn. They seem to think that the scary stuff that is spattered out about is a mere game and nothing else.

This is a real threat. The elders are at risk.. At the very least, they need to be watched over. The tech experts have to try, even if it seems like it’s falling on deaf ears, to explain the risks.

There is now a need of a passing test for the use of internet by the elderly, some sort of a licence, so that they can use the web with full knowledge or do not use it at all.

Let it be clear, this is not a likable idea but it’s one of the only approaches that come to mind..

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Jan 7 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry