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Independent Research Paper-Internet Security

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Independent Research Paper-Internet Security

Using the Internet today, there are numerous ways to stay connected to other people also using the Internet. You can use e mail, chat rooms, and the most popular, Instant Messaging. The risks of using e mail have always been evident. Receiving and downloading e mails and attachments from people you do not know always carried the risk of downloading and infecting your computer with one or several viruses that could possibly destroy your computers operating system.

On a personal computer, the cost of having your computer destroyed due to a virus would be at the most several hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on whether the whole computer needed to be replaced. But on a computer …show more content…

The sophisticated techniques of hackers that are used to infiltrate computers through e mail, are now being adapted to help hackers send virus files or Trojan Horse programs to IM users or capture a user’s list of IM buddies. These files are called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which can be purchased from major suppliers and used to create an IM worm.

Another aspect of IM worms and viruses that attracts many hackers to this type if hacking, is that it is faster, simpler, and more effective. Unlike those worms, IM worms do not need to scan the internet for the IP addresses of vulnerable systems, a process that greatly slows the spread of traditional worms. Instead, IM worms simply use the infected user's buddy list to find new targets. Even with a scenario in which the buddy lists of infected and target machines were identical except for just one IM user, an IM worm could infect 500,000 machines in just 31 seconds.

With the growing amount of Instant Messaging being used to conduct every day

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