IF EXPERTS are right, there is a 1-in-10 chance that the family computer — any family’s computer — is part of a criminal conspiracy.
Sunday’s New York Times brought the situation to national attention with an article on “botnets,” software that invades unprotected computers, copies private information and links the computers together by the thousands or millions to commit crimes. Criminals can then control the computers remotely and use the information gathered in any way they please.
The crimes range from the merely annoying — generating floods of spam e-mails that inundate the Internet — to theft and fraud. Experts in computer security think that up to 11 percent of the 650 million computers linked to the Internet are infected with botnet programs.
The programmers who write the botnet software are wily and usually attack the easiest and biggest target — computers that run Microsoft Windows. Windows is by far the most-used operating system in the world and its various versions over the years have inadvertently included opportunities for break-ins by computer criminals.
The increasing availability of broadband Internet, which connects a computer to the Internet any time the computer is on, has widened the opportunity for such invasions. A computer murmuring in the den in the early morning dark may doing its own mundane chores — or it may be sending out reams of spam or acting as a relay station to order goods using stolen credit-card numbers.
Unfortunately, too many computer owners have made their machines easy targets for botnets by failing to keep their operating or security software up to date. Some people turn off their security software all together.
A computer security program gives no protection at all if it is never installed or turned on. Neither can it be much help if it is never — or rarely — updated to deal with the latest threats identified by computer experts.
So computer owners have a choice: to take prudent steps to protect their machines and their most private data or to risk becoming part of a dangerous, costly and growing criminal conspiracy.