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The Critical Field of Computer Security Essay

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Computer Security
Developing the skills required to ensure best practice in the Information Technology world starts here and now. Cyber-criminals, hackers, pentesters, corporate espionage, and disgruntled employees are everyday annoyances IT professionals will find themselves devoting massive amounts of time to, while maintaining their respective networks' functionality for legitimate users. The field covers all the processes and mechanisms by which computer-based equipment, information are protected from unintended or unauthorized access, modification or removal. Computer security is a critical part of technology as it grows in our daily lives. One use of the term "computer security" refers to technology that is used to implement …show more content…

According to Paul Gil an "antivirus" is protective software designed to defend your computer against malicious software Malicious software, or "malware" includes: viruses, Rats, Trojans, dialers, hijackers, keyloggers, and other bad code that vandalizes or steals your computer contents.(Gil 1) In practice to have a strong defense, your antivirus software needs to run in the background at all times, scanning and searching for malicious code and should be kept updated so it recognizes new versions of malicious software.(Kishore 1) A variety of strategies are typically used to detect a malicious program. Signature based detection uses searching for known shifts or shreds of data within executable code. (Kishore 2) However, Viruses have become more complex .It is possible for a computer to be infected with new malware for which no signature is yet known; and malware is often modified to change its signature without affecting functionality.(Kishore 2) To counter such so-called zero-day threats, heuristics can be used. New types of techniques have been make to solve this issue. One type of heuristics, generic signatures, can identify differences by looking for slight variations of known malicious code in files. (Gil 1) These are some more of the advanced antiviruses. Some antivirus software can also

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