There are a vast amount of security threats to a personal computer. These security threats are harmful because if successfully activated an attacker can access personal information and use it for potential harm to you or your computer. These attacks can also potentially slow down your personal computer and may even cause it to crash. When a computer crashes and the information is not backed up somewhere else you won’t be able to retrieve your data. There are techniques that attackers use to access information on your system.
Connecting a personal computer to the internet enables others to use your computer and share your information. All who use the internet should take steps to protect their computer, as well as their private and
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Worms effect the computers that are on the same network. A worm will consume bandwidth and will spread to other computers on a network. Worms can also cause a server to crash or make a user’s files unusable or corruption. They can also create a backdoor on a target computer. Rootkit will run its utilities on your computer without your knowledge of it even being there, they are designed to avoid detection. A rootkit, like a worm, can also create a backdoor on target computers allowing a hacker to send things such as spam or emails that can use a target computer to perform a denial-of-service attack on servers. A zombies will open a backdoor on an affected computer to allow predators to use it for malicious purposes without the owner’s knowledge. A Browser hijacker has the ability to change a home page or search page in your browser. An email viruse can potentially harm a computer when an effected email is open opened. The mousetrap ping happens when a website uses a script preventing the Internet user from leaving a website. Last but not least, spam comes in the form of an email usually and it’s junk or bulk emails that come from random senders known as spammers.
Attackers also use social engineering to bypass technical defenses. An attacker will persuade a potential victim to release malicious things on their personal computer to benefit themselves. These people tell their victims
To start off with I chose to go with our banking or financial industry. The banking industry is constantly getting attacked by various methods on a daily basis. I chose this industry because I happen to know someone who works in the security sector at Wells Fargo Bank, he was a good person to get information on what he sees on a daily or weekly basis. This paper is the opinion of myself and with gathered information from various resources.
A worm is another way how a network can be attacked, worms are very easy to spread between computers. Worms are transferred from one computer to another without human interaction. The worms can be transferred by emails, USB drives or downloading files. This means that worms have the capability to transfer from one computer to another and to replicate so they can infect vast amounts of computers.
Homeland Security is one of the most important departments in the United States. The United States Department of Homeland Security job is to reduce our vulnerability to terrorism and lead a national effort to help prevent terrorist attacks on our nation (Computer Concept, pg. 50). As technology evolves over the course of time, computers end up playing a crucial role in homeland security.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 security became a major concern for citizens and of course lawmakers. Unsure of what could happen next we were all afraid. Homeland Security encompasses policies, laws, organizations, and procedures designed to protect the rights and freedoms inherent in the US Constitution. Homeland defense which is sometime interchanged with Homeland Security deals with extra-territorial threats and preemptive operations (Parons & Oja, 51). Governments in many countries are devoting significant resources to combat this growing threat. In the United Stats, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS is responsible for reducing America?s vulnerability to
Social engineering refers to the techniques that are used by the criminals to manipulate people to give out their confidential information such as user names, passwords and bank accountants without being aware (Hadnagy, 2011). This technique is used by the criminals over the internet to trick people to disclose their confidential information rather than hacking the software installed on their PC. Social engineering takes different forms and it is perpetrated by the individuals who wants to take advantage of others after getting confidential information that allows them to access their accounts such as email or databases that contain protected information. For instance, a criminal who want to access another person’s email account may send
Attacks on critical infrastructures do not always target the vulnerabilities in the systems themselves. One of the weakest links in security is the human factor. Social engineering targets this, and it has worked very effectively for them. According to Raj Samani and Charles McFarland, social engineering is “the deliberate application of deceitful techniques designed to manipulate someone into divulging information or performing actions that may result in the release of that information” (Samani and McFarland 6). Social engineering attacks are divided into two categories: hunting and farming. In hunting, the attacker wants to extract information from the target with little interaction. An example would be a phishing
In today's world there is an abundance of information. When you think of hackers you normally think of individuals who use technology to gain access to information that is not otherwise available. In a lot of cases this can be true but there are other ways to gain access to information that requires little technical knowledge. A lot of this information is available freely without restrictions. Social engineering takes advantage of this fact to acquire additional information by manipulating perceptions of those disclosing the needed information.
Linton (2011, p.44) stated that hacking of network of common users and attacking their personal computers is one of the most threatening problems at present. It is happening in every second that results in a loss in several ways like loss of credentials, personal information etcetera. Although the use of personal computers and the internet has been increased rapidly, numbers of users who are the expert and have good knowledge to tackle the matters are very rare. In addition, time, as well as required equipment to protect hacking, is also very.
a significant amount of data security breaches are due to either employee oversight or poor business process. This presents a challenge for businesses as the solution to these problems will be far greater than simply deploying a secure content management system. Business processes will need to be examined, and probably re-engineered; personnel will need to be retrained, and a cultural change may be required within the organization. These alone are significant challenges for a business. A recent example of what is probably unintentional featured an Australian employment agency’s web site publishing “Confidential data including names, email addresses and passwords of clients” from its database on the public web site. An additional
In order to feel safer about using a computer, there are some precautions that may be taken to prevent any potential hacking or privacy invasion. Firewalls may be set up to “prevent any unauthorized access to or from a network.” For a wireless network, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) would be used to avoid hackers. An implement that hackers use to infiltrate a network is called SATAN. It is a “Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks.” It was initially created to allow administrators to find any vulnerability in a system. Hackers have used this to look at important files and documents that are confidential (webopedia).
Network security has changed significantly over the past years. There is more and more data to monitor and analyze in order to detect the activity of your data and systems. Securing a network has many variables. Password authentication, network access, patches, anti-virus protection, intrusion detection, firewall and network monitoring tools are just a few of the things you can do to protect yourself.
The purpose of this paper is to explain what I use to protect my personal privacy. There are many different things that can be use to protect someone’s information and keep hackers from accessing their computer. Some people use anti-virus, firewalls and anti-spam software to help protect their personal privacy. As we all know with today’s technology having just anti-virus or firewalls are not good enough, but having something is better than nothing. They do not protect you from new or custom-made viruses and evil-scripts. There is no one solution to protect you from Identity Theft, it’s just too many threats to keep up with, and having one software will not do the job for you. One key to protecting your information would be
Safety of information is the most valuable asset in any organization particular those who provide financial service to others. Threats can come from a variety of sources such as human threats, natural disasters and technical threats. By identifying the potential threats to the network, security measure can be taken to combat these threats, eliminate them or reduce the likelihood and impact if they should occur.
Computers have become much more important and popular to our society in recent decades. The computer’s ability to perform so many tasks speedily and reliably makes it useful for a wide variety of purposes. Therefore much important information is stored on computers. Because people and organisations depend on computers every day for a variety of significant tasks, it is imperative that the systems which are used are protected from loss, damage and misuse. This essay identifies some potential risks to computer systems and software and the safeguards that can be taken to minimise these risks. A computer security risk is defined as any event or action that could cause a loss or damage to computer equipment, software, data and information, or
Threats can put specific computer system or business computers at risk. So, exploits have to be solved so that hackers are not able to hack your operating system and cause damage.