By Ira Winkler

On a recent 20/20, the show covered the story of a teenager who was accused of being a pedophile because child pornography was found on his computer. It has since been decided that the teenager actually knew nothing about the pornography on the system, but was the victim of a hacker who compromised his system and set it up as a child porn sharing site. Over 200 “infections” were found on his system, whatever that means. The problem with all stories like this is that instead of making the story truly useful, and telling people how they themselves can protect themselves is a serious way, they treat it like an afterthought. Worse was that the protection “recommendations” still left people vulnerable to the same attacks that the teenager likely fell victim to.

Basically, John Stossel’s “recommendations”, which he said came from some mythical “experts” were trivial and ineffective. The only one that actually afforded real protection was telling people they should have a firewall. There were no references to following other critical tools:

However 20/20 is basically blind to real information security and the anonymous experts they claim to consult are either non-existent or not afraid to identify themselves.

This leads me to ask, Who are your experts?

ABC News: 20/20