Info about Computers
Computer security risks
As soon as you plug to the internet you are exposed to all internet dangers. It the same as leaving your home when you face the same dangers, you may encounter a criminal or something may happen to you, like a car crash. So you protect yourself. You wear your seat belt and you have a spray in your bag
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Let’s understand what are the risk that you are exposed when you are connected to the internet so that you know what protection methods you should adopt no matter if you are in the comfort of your home and use the internet for your personal things or you are a company that uses the internet to develop the business.
By a computer security risk we understand the exposures that our computer is facing when connected to the internet that will cause malfunction or data lost. Who are those internet criminals? What are their tools? What are they after?
According to their operating method and based on what they are after these are called: hackers, crackers, cyberterrorists, cyberextortionists, unethical employees, script kiddies. Hackers are accessing a computer or the computer network without permission, to take information or to corrupt the files and applications. In the past the term was used in a positive way, describing those that were entering a computer or network in a legal way.
Crackers were the opposite of hackers, but when hackers were considered good and they are doing the same thing. Cyberterrorists are accessing a computer or a computer network illegally in political interests. They are very well experienced. Cyberextortionists are those that are trying to benefit a company or a person after stealing confidential information from a computer or computer network.
An unethical employee will access the companies’ files illegally to use them in different purposes.
A script kiddie resemble cracker, but they usually don’t have so many technical skills or they are teenagers that get into other computers by mistake.
All of these people use a list of methods through which they are entering in a computer. The most often threads to a computer are caused by: Trojan horse, viruses and worms. There a lot other threads but the list is too long. The first one, like the names suggests, is a virus that gets in your computer and is sending information out to hackers.
Viruses and worms are introduced into computers; the virus can spread to infect the system while a worm will duplicate repeatedly to cause damage. A type of virus that can attack your computer is Dos, which is the abbreviation to Denial of service. Dos makes your computer to crash or make data to be processed so fast that you will not be able to use it. How do these get actually get into your computer? By using windows networks to share information that are not protected. Hackers are scanning the unprotected windows by using active operating system detection tools, ping sweep, port scanning. Electronic mail is also a very common way for hackers to enter its content ad by this they can check your account details and take important information like bank accounts and passwords.
For all these problems there is special software that will protect your computer from being illegally used.