Opinion: Scaremongering

You can't visit a tech news website without reading about yet another gaping security hole in Windows/Linux/Unix or WiFi/VoIP/UC or just the plain old big bad scary Internet itself. Who are these heinous hackers who manage to discover these obscure holes on a daily basis? Most of the threats involve the use of tech knowledge that most readers can't fathom unless they hold a PhD in IT, so how can we tell which, if any, we should be worried about?

Is the latest outrageous security breach opened up by jailbreaking your iPhone likely to ever be exploited? Or would anyone with the nous to jailbreak their phone also hold the knowledge to prevent anyone else entering without permission? These questions of course, presume that jailbreaking your iPhone means something more techie than retrieving it from your mate who got busted for being annoying at the World Youth Day festivities.

But what about the threat to your PC from all these Windows exploits? Are you more likely to get exploited by a hacker or by your ISP when you blow your download limit collecting patches to protect you from the next obscure security scare? What we need to do is contract the Mythbusters to spend a month online without any protection and see how badly their PC gets borked.

Do you believe all the scary security stories being peddled by analysts? Or do you think they're just Tampa'ing with our fear genes?