Bill Cheswick figures that pretty much everyone logging onto a computer every day is just like his 81-year-old Dad, a reasonably computer-savvy man whose computer nonetheless is filled with viruses and other bad stuff that he doesn't even know is there, much less how to get rid of it.

"His machines have been taken over by viruses," said the younger Cheswick, chief scientist at a New Jersey cybersecurity firm and co-author of a book on viruses and the troublesome implications for identify theft.

Cheswick will be one of 100 cybersecurity experts at a three-day symposium that begins today at Carnegie Mellon University on making computer security and privacy more user friendly for the masses.

"It's hard to tell what's the right thing to do, especially when you're running a Windows PC," said Cheswick, who will deliver the keynote address tomorrow at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, known as "SOUPS" -- using Microsoft's PowerPoint program.

"No wonder people just give up, it's just so much work for computer users to keep up," said event organizer and CMU researcher Lorrie Cranor, an expert on computer privacy and public policy. Between anti-virus software, spyware detectors and spam filters, computer users are often confused about how and when to protect their computers, she said.

Cranor considers "phishing" -- e-mails supposedly from credit card firms, banks and other trusted companies that appear to be authentic requests for personal information but are really the work of scammers on the prowl -- to be particularly frightening.

With phishing, unsuspecting computer users who receive e-mails may click on links to Web sites that actually are used to steal information about them. Several sessions at the symposium will feature new ways to detect and warn users of such identity theft attacks and test news tools with real users.

Cheswick believes that fending off cyber thieves should start from the beginning, when the software is being designed. "You have to think about it before you build the software."

That's the point of this powwow, organizers said: To get academics and tech companies to put their heads together on ways to make maintaining privacy and security in the computer world a little less time consuming and a lot easier to manage.

Take all those alphanumeric passwords needed to gain entry to computers and Web sites. Instead of difficult to remember passwords, in the future, they might look like a series of abstract drawings that users piece together or a stream of random photographs of faces.

At least one session also will be dedicated to getting together computer privacy and security researchers with other computer researchers who focus on human and computer interaction. Both groups have been toiling away on security topics for years but rarely have talked to one another, Cranor said, adding: "We gotta get these people talking."