This will be brief and incomplete, but I think has promise.
The internet can be amazing. Especially so for those off frail health, who maybe cannot travel to see friends or meet on person due to health concerns. Like the Elderly.
And, it can also be dangerous: Some elders I know have been tricked into calling ‘scammers’ and could have lost a lot of money.
This kind of scamming usually starts with a fake web site that says: You need to call XYZ because of some virus or something. They are designed to look real, compelling, and frightening.
It’s really hard to provide simple rules on how to deal with this – even the obvious things (don’t call XYZ based on a popup, just look up their number and call them directly!) don’t really work: if you can’t trust the computer to give you a phone number, how would you find the number for XYZ in the first place? The Whitepages?!?
Wouldn’t it be better if you could stop the fake websites? Turns out you can, mostly. Rather than try to do this on a per-computer basis, use a router with Ad Guard Home on it, and configure it to use more secure DNS block lists.
Like this: https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/home-routers
With DNS filters like this: https://filterlists.com/
Bonus points: setup the router for remote management via a VPN like Tailscale. This makes it much easier to check that things are working, add new lists if needed, or even just cut off the internet at the router if your elders are in the middle of a scam.
I’ve set this up myself – it’s reliable & performant. To be honest, it hasn’t blocked anything malicious, so I don’t know for sure that it works like I think. But if it makes a 1-in-1000 days threat into a 1-in-1-million day threat and gives Elders a chance to benefit from the internet with less fear – that would be a *huge* win.
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