There are lots of articles with tips for parents on how to keep their kids safe online. But what about those of us who are the resident computer geeks in the family – how do we keep our parents and other family members safe from getting viruses and falling prey to phishing attacks?
We’ve all been through this – a member of our family somehow manages to get a virus or fill their computer with adware, and then we have to fix it. Of course, nobody did anything wrong or visited any bad sites – it just “happened.” We spend hours trying to fix it, and when we finally do, we realize that we want those hours of our life back. Or worse yet – it’s so bad that we can’t fix it, and need to reinstall everything for them.
I’m not implying that our parents are in any way unintelligent; I think the problem is that they don’t take these threats seriously enough.
So how do you – the geek in the family – prevent this from happening? One answer that you’ll hear from the geek community is “install Linux.” If you can get away with that without the guilt trip, go for it, but here are some tips for Windows users – read on.