The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

Nowadays, people rely on computers to create, store and manage critical information. Consequently, it is important for users to aware that computer security plays a major role in protecting their data from loss, damage, and misuse. Similarly, online security has been online trader’s main concern in protecting their websites from potential threats, such as phishing, security hacking, information theft, virus, worms and etc.

Today, i would like to discuss about the threats being bring by technical attacks and nontechnical attack.

Technical attack:

Technical attack is an attack perpetrated using software and systems knowledge or expertise. There are several threats being bring by technical attack, such as Denial-of-service(DoS)attack, virus, worm and others.

(i) Denial-of-service(DoS)attack

DoS refer to an attack on a website in which an attacker uses specialized software to send a flood of data packets to the target computer with the aim of overloading its resources.It may cause a network shut down, making it impossible for users to access the site.

(ii) Distributed denial-of-service(DDoS)attack
DDoS is a DoS attack in which the attacker gains illegal administrative access to as many computer on the Internet as possible and uses these multiple computers to send a flood of data packets to the target computer.

(iii) Virus

Virus is a piece of software code that inserts itself into a host,including the operating systems,to propogate it;it requires that its host program be run to activate it. A virus will simply infect and spread over the operating systems and consequently cause the collapse in the server system. Although viruses are self-replicating, they cannot propogate automatically across a network, they require a human to move them from one computer to another.

(iv)Worm

It's a malicious software which is a stand alone application.

It's often designed to propagate through a network, rather than just a single computer. When your computer is infect of worm, computer will slow starting or slow running. It'll also face unexpected or frequent system failures.

(v)Trojan Horse
A trojan horse is a program that appears to have a useful function but contains a hidden function that presents a security risk. The name is derived from the Trojan Horse in Greek mythology.

Nontechnical attack:

Nontechnical attack refer to an attack that uses chicanery to trick people into revealing sensitive information or performing actions that compromise the security of a network. An example of nontechnical attack is phishing. Phishing is a broadly launched social engineering attack in which an electronic identity is misrepresented in an attempt to trick individuals into revealing credentials.

These internet security threats will try to steal your information from your computer through the internet. It's very danger if our computer online without any internet security system such as anti-virus. For example, Trojans will track into your computer and steal your personal information such as password of your e-banking account, email account and etc. For business companies, it's really a treat to them because they save their business infromation in the computer such as daily profits, project or new planning for their business venture. Therefore, we need to take some preventive actions to prevent these threats.