Network Security

The internet is a whole new world.  It offers so much entertainment, information, and a faster way to communicate.  But it also brings many different threats.  Like the physical world, the internet world is dangerous to our computers and oneself.  If victim to an attack, you could end up losing money, information, and much more.  There are several different types of attacks that you have to look out for.

            Email spam, phishing, and viruses are some of the things you need to be on the lookout for.  Computer viruses are the ones that most people know about. When you get a virus, the virus runs itself on your computer without authorization and tries to spread to other computers.  Your computer is at risk due to human error.  For example, if your friend’s computer gets infected and is trying to spread.  It will find your email and send you an email with an attachment.  The subject or file name might be something tricky to get you to click on it and run it.  When a person does that, the virus then infects your computer and creates a vicious cycle from computer to computer.  Phishing is a fraudulent act that tries to steal information from you.  The information will be sensitive like bank information, passwords, and etc.  This attack will also come in an email form.  You may get an email saying your bank account has been locked and to unlock it then you must click on the link provided.  The link may take you to a website just like your bank, but a fake one. A person might enter their information and then the phishing scheme has won. Spam is the unwanted emails that you receive.  Most of it is stopped by the spam blocker, luckily.  If you click on your junk inbox on your email, then you will find a ton of it.  Most of it advertises products or websites.  Some of it may be legit stuff, but still not worth the risk. Each of the attacks can provide unwanted symptoms.

            Viruses are very annoying if you’ve ever had one.  Some of the symptoms may be different.  A virus may run different programs constantly without the owner’s permission.  Such as sending emails to the other email addresses stored on your computer to try and infect other computers.  The virus may also steal information like your bank info, card numbers, and personal information.  A virus may also start deleting all your data.  A virus is a headache that can cause your life to turn upside down.  Phishing is another headache that can be devastating.  A sign that you may have fell for phishing is money being taken out of your bank account or emptied.  Another thing that could happen is identity theft. If you fall victim to a spam attack, then you might have noticed the malware that has been set on your computer. You could also check your email outbox and see if you’ve become a spammer if your computer has become part of their botnets.  A common symptom of all could be a slower running computer than usual. These attacks can be avoided and should be avoided.

            The best defense against viruses are antivirus software.  These software’s look for known viruses and disable them.  But it could possible not be completely up to date with all the new viruses.  Make sure your software is up to date.  A good way to avoid viruses is to not run or install questionable attachments and stay away from sketchy websites.  A way around phishing is making sure that you’re on secure websites.  According to M. Adil, R. Khan and M. A. Nawaz Ul Ghani (2020), “Preventive Phishing is also use URL with an IP address, attributes, domain name, and link text to check against each mail received, with internal configuration to verify the security standard, if any mismatch or similarity index with blacklist information in its internal configuration they stop them, log file and report them [9].” The defense against spam is the spam blocker that comes along with your email. You can also adjust the settings on it.  Another way to get out of it, is to unsubscribe to it if it has the option.  However, you are not able to completely avoid spam emails.  According to A. I. Taloba and S. S. I. Ismail (2019), “Various techniques have been used for spam detecting task such as Blacklist, White-list, Content based filtering and Machine learning techniques.  There is no such spam detection technique has the ability to detect spam e-mails 100% without blocking any ham.” Most of the attacks can be stopped if you are smart about it and play safe.