President Obama wants you to protect your computer

It’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the United States, and Barack Obama himself has been roped-in to encourage computer users to defend their computers and protect themselves against the threat of malware, hackers, spammers and identity thieves online.

Disappointingly, despite having been up on the White House’s YouTube channel for a couple of days the video of Obama has currently only been watched by fewer than 750 people. That’s pretty dismal, and doesn’t say much for the American public’s interest in protecting their computers – but maybe it will pick up soon.

Certainly, I’m going to do my little bit (hey, I may not be a US citizen – but I still reckon we need more people to know about safe computing) by embedding the video here:

It’s good to see the White House encouraging computer security awareness amongst the millions of internet users in the United States. It should not be forgotten that the majority of spam, denial-of-service and malware attacks seen today take advantage of botnets of innocent peoples’ computers without their knowledge.

As such, a large part of the problem can often be in your own back yard rather than in a distant country.