The internet has become a common household resource. Even in the third world countries, many homes have their internet connection.
The Internet is undoubtedly a fantastic resource for families and offers a rich content for educational purposes. However, there are potential dangers that accompanies the Internet. It’s an open venue welcoming the world of viruses, spam, trojans, pornography, spyware and other nasties.
How do you protect yourself from all of these. Information! You have to be fully aware about the threats to your computer internet so that you can use this technology to your fullest advantage.
- Virus - A computer program itself as copies. They often disrupt your computer system or damaging your data. Viruses are usually attachments received by e-mail to carefully opening a little dubious source. They can affect anyone, for example, the destruction of the Mydoom worm assigned one of three small and medium enterprises.
- Spyware – Sends information about you and your computer to someone else. May send spyware site addresses you have visited or worse still, transmit personal information. With today’s concerns about identity theft it is a real worry. Spyware is normally received as part of shareware or freeware downloaded from the web.
- IP Spoofing – A technique to gain unauthorized access to computers, whereby the intruder sends messages to a computer with an address indicating that the message is coming from a trusted host.
- Trojans – An apparently legitimate computer is really intended to disrupt and damage the computer activity by sending information, perhaps even passwords on a third party without your knowledge. For example, recent emails entitled “Osama Bin Laden Captured” attempted to download the “Trj / Small.B. If the Trojan horse embedded Web has been clicked. This trojan attempts to hijack the PC.
- Spam – unsolicited mail often promoting products of a dubious financial or sexual nature. Do not leave your e-mail Internet address on websites and bulletin boards as they are harvested by spammers.
- Adware – place ads on your screen. They take many forms, including pop-ups, and ads popunders that appear later, even if your browser is closed. Some are sent using the Windows Messenger service, which allows a spammer to direct an ad directly to your computer by sequentially sending messages to IP addresses. Always irritating, they are also often of a pornographic nature.
- Dialers - for those of us still with dial up modem,dialer programs redirect calls to a number very expensive.You do not know until you get the bill.
- Hijackers - Hijackers may take control of your web browser and reset your home page, search bar and search pages. They can redirect you to undesirable sites or stop you go to specific sites.
- Hackers – With so much personal data available online to anyone with a password, you must be sure your password is security. If you use your maiden name of mother, your cat’s name or your birthday, your password is at risk.Here are two tips for a secure password.
- Mode One –Free pick two random words of three letters and two figures. Mix them and what do you have? A Secure Password such as “red19cat” or “hotpin73.
- Method Two – pick a short sequence of words such as “quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog” and you have a password “qbfjothd” .
- Phishing – Emails purporting to come from the reliability sources such as Paypal, Ebay or your bank. Often wish check your account details, they may very realistic, but are generally scams to harvest usernames and passwords. Always open a new browser window and type the retractor address there, rather than clicking on the link provided.
- Hoaxes – Chain letters, scams, false alarms. At best they take time and bandwidth, but at worst vulnerable be victims of fraud. Pass it on!
- Stranger-danger – For those of us with children – do you know what they do when they are online? Are they work on tasks at home, or are they downloading illegal music or pornography? Or are they strangers in the Chat Discussion rooms? You should consider blocking access to undesirable logging sites and their activity with a surveillance tool. Oh, and do not forget that where children are concerned, computers should always be kept in a family room and never in their bedroom.