Internet Security

Many of Internet users have never noticed about the risks when they are online. And we should be more aware of Internet security to protect ourselves from the threats.

To be simpler to the Internet users who have not much technical knowledge, we have some very popular definitions such as Virus, Spyware, Trojan and Phishing. Hardly to say which one is more dangerous since each of them is harmful in different ways.

Virus is a worm in the computer and has the ability to copy itself and it will occupy the resources of the computer. Spyware exploits the information and data of the computer or the network and sends them back to the place they came from or anywhere else that has been assigned. Trojan horse is formed by virus and spyware, Trojan’s mission is stealing information and it can be spread widely on the Internet. However, Trojan is difficult to write and develop. And the last one, phishing – most of programmers often add phishing to the software for advertisement. It runs silently on the computer and suddenly appears as a pop-up on your screen.

Generally speaking, they all have the ability to spread in different means and can lead to data loss, downtime, denial-of-service and others.

In addition, there is another type of incidents is Hacking which relates to hackers and crackers. They can intrude through the local network or Internet, using the bugs in Windows or put some backdoor programs to an FTP (File Transfer Protocol), or make a Denial-of-Service attack that is very dangerous when you don’t have a firewall.

Those incidents are very dangerous for both the computer users and especially the netizens. Questions given out that where they come from?

It is difficult to characterize the people who cause incidents. An intruder may be a teenager who is curious about what he can do on the Internet, an individual seeking personal gain like credit card numbers, pirated software, etc. It also may be a college student who wants to test his new software tools, or a paid "spy" seeking information for the economic advantage of a corporation or country. So it could be from anyone on the Internet who you don’t even know.

We have already gotten some basic information about threats on the Internet, now moving on to the methods of protecting ourselves from them. Experts have some advices:

- Do