sability of security software is partly to blame for low protection levels in many computers, according to international security experts. In a panel session at this year's Australian Unix Users Group (AUUG) conference in Melbourne yesterday, software security developers gave reasons why the IT industry is still at the mercy of so many problems. University of Auckland computer scientist Peter Gutmann said many security standards were written 10 years ago and have mostly just been tweaked since then.

"A lot of the security stuff is designed by crypto geeks [and] because of a lack of usability, people can't apply them correctly," Gutmann said, adding usability is just as important as "having a bunch of crypto and let people figure it out from there".

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