Risks to end-users: Security

The growth of the Internet has meant that "black hat" hacking has evolved from malicious pranks to the work of sophisticated organized crime groups and terrorists involved in identity theft, fraud, extortion and money-laundering.

The growth of e-commerce means that end-users risk exposing sensitive personal information via insecure software to these types of criminals.

The use of proprietary closed source software means that they may not easily find out about or patch security vulnerabilities unless and until the vendor releases a fix.