Blame the User

“Oh, come on,” Richard said quietly to himself.

“Sorry?” Bill, or Bob, or whatever lifted his head from behind Richard’s monitor.

“Sorry, not you,” Richard said. “It’s this stupid magazine. Everyone’s blaming the financial industry for the subprime mess, but what about the home buyers? Why doesn’t anyone make them take responsibility for signing up for loans they couldn’t repay?”

“Good point, sir.” Bob or Bill put his head back down and tapped some more keys.

“How much longer, anyway?” said Richard.

“It’ll be another hour or so. Um, did you change any of the settings on your anti-spyware utility?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. It was running real slow so I changed a bunch of settings in various places until it sped up. Why?”

Bill or Bob sighed. “Well, you’ve got a major spyware infestation, including several stealth keyloggers installed by Trojans. They’ve probably captured all your passwords and account settings. Do you access the company trading accounts from this machine?”

“Sure, I have to. So, what do you have to do?”

“Well, sir, you should probably make sure there haven’t been any unauthorized transactions from your account. In the short term, I can get you up and running but I’ll have to reformat your drive and reinstall Windows. You’ll lose all your files, but your computer will be up again. I may be able to restore your files from backup but I’ll have to make sure they’re clean.”

“OK. Whatever.” Richard went back to his reading while his computer made the Windows shutdown and startup noises several times in a row. Finally, he folded the magazine and hurled it across the room, neatly hitting the rim of his wastebasket and knocking it over. “Damn. You’d think people would know better than to sign false income statements. I just don’t get it.”

He pondered for a few more minutes. Then, “If people aren’t going to be responsible, how do you keep it from happening again?”

Bob or Bill looked up and hesitated for a moment. “Well, sir, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t let anyone use a computer unless they knew what they were doing.”