Analysis: Time to circle the wagons as online fraud and malware cause large damages
By Tom Foremski - August 7, 2006
Consumer Reports found more than $8bn in online fraud, another $7.8bn spent by consumers to repair or replace computers damaged by spyware and viruses. It is amazing that people still use the Internet and find it useful.
The Consumer Reports figures don't factor in the costs of ad click fraud, which could be as high as one click in eight being fraudulent. Consumers pay because of higher marketing costs by retailers.
And also what about the lost time people spend dealing with viruses, spyware, spam etc. There must be several billions dollars in lost productivity that should be added to the damages caused by fraudsters and spammers. That is a very large bill to pay and it is one that people still seem to be willing to pay because of the other benefits.
But, not everybody is going to be willing to continue to take risks on the Internet and that is a problem that the industry needs to tackle. How do you make it safe for users?
AOL, for example, could have created a walled garden, a safe(r) place for users. Instead it decided to open up to the Internet, an example of it again, choosing the wrong business strategy.
Another approach is to create closed platforms as in the cell phone market. The cell phone service provider chooses the phones, the applications, and handles billing. A cell phone service is a more secure place than the wilds of the Internet.
Why not a Google or Yahoo PC? Or one from another company. It could be inexpensive, it could be sold as a service. And it would have consumer applications such as photo editor, word processor, spreadsheet, etc. It would have a browser but it would only communicate with trusted web sites, Google validated sites, for example. GOOG and YHOO and MSFT already have lots of consumer apps and could easily brand such a system set it up to use its services first, and that would be good enough for 90 per cent of tasks.
And if it used technology such as that from Wyse, it could be set up as a thin computing system and it would be highly secure because a central server would determine what applications it would run, and prevent spyware or any other malware from causing damage or exposing users to fraud.
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