The director of the government's National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC) has once again raised concerns about broadband user’s security. The always-on nature of the technology makes it more vulnerable and many still do not take adequate precautions:

'The sophistication is such now that machines that are compromised can be used to attack the critical national infrastructure,' Cumming said.

By using trojans and viruses to attack insecure home and work PCs, cyber-criminals are building 'bot-armies' of compromised computers that can be used to attack government web sites, energy firms, banks and other critical systems with distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), he says.

'We need to up the security game of ordinary citizens because if they fall down on information security then their compromised machines can be used against us,' says Cumming. 'There is a widespread increase in broadband access to the internet, but until now no one has considered all the security implications.'

By point of fact, the security implications are both well documented and well known, yet many ISP's, computer manufacturers and the government itself still fail to properly educate users.

Thankfully the director agrees with that, although as usual it's all talk and no action.

If the government can issue a 'homeland security' leaflet telling us all not to go into burning buildings, then perhaps they could do something similar here with a much more common threat? More @ VNUNet.