Threats of communicating in I.

27 February 2014

This blog will tell you a few different kinds of online threats. These are problems many people face throughout their time online

Cyber bullying Cyber bullying is when the internet or

mobile phones are used to send vicious and unpleasant messages (often anonymously) to others with the direct intention of upsetting them. Cyberbullying is even more harmful to young people than faceto-face bullying for a number of reasons:

Permanence: The insults, comments or images can be preserved by the person who was bullied or by others so that the victim may read or view them over and over again and the harm is re-inflicted with each reading or viewing. Audience size: The size of the audience that is able to view or access the damaging material increases the victims humiliation. Familiarity: Many young people are friends with or know their cyber bully either through school or other personal connections, increasing the potential for embarrassment and humiliation. Social Networking: Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow cyber bullies to engage in campaigns against a particular person which may involve many others. Speed: The speed at which harmful messages can reach large audiences also plays a major part in making cyberbullying so damaging to the targets.

Spam Spam is a general name given to junk email.

This is email that you have not signed up for that is sent to you from a variety of sources. To prevent spam, you can adjust your spam filter in your email client or web browser. This is usually found in the options menu. Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, typically to large numbers of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.

The Damage Spam Can Do Spam might be free to send, but it is very costly to its recipients and the Internet community in the following ways:

It costs you moneySpam costs millions of pounds a year in Internet resources. It clogs Internet plumbing, forcing ISPs to buy bigger electronic pipes to carry all the information on the Internet. This drives up the cost of operations, which is passed on to you, the ISP's customer.

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Wasted productivityif you're a business owner, spam wastes workers' time and productivity and increases expenses because it consumes helpdesk and IT resources to deal with it.

It wastes your timeSpam wastes your time. Wading through spam to find the legitimate email takes time, especially if you get a lot of spam. If it takes you one second to delete a spam email and you get 900 spam emails each day (for a time I was getting more than 1,000), that wastes 15 minutes of your time.

It disconnects youif the flow of spam becomes too great; you have to abandon your email address in favour of a new one. This disconnects you from people who lose track of you because they don't update their email address lists.

It's annoying and offensiveSpam is advertising you're not interested in, and that's just plain annoying. And often it comes with content that's offensive or at the very least distasteful.

It endangers childrenit exposes children to topics and images that they shouldn't have to worry about, including adult content.

It's a malware carriersome spam carries email attachments that if opened can infect your computer with viruses or spyware.

It distributes scamsSpam can also be used to mass-mail 419 scams or phishing emails.

Phishing One of the most recent online crimes involves fraudsters trying to get an individuals
personal information by sending them an email asking for a response. Phishing techniques - Link manipulation Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email (and the spoofed website it leads to) appear to belong to the spoofed organisation. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers, such as this example URL, http://www.yourbank.com.example.com/. Another common trick is to make the anchor text for a link appear to be a valid URL when the link actually goes to the phishers site. A further problem with URLs has been found in the handling of internationalised domain names (IDN) in web browsers that might allow visually identical web addresses to lead to different, possibly malicious websites.

DDOS, short for Distributed Denial of Service, is a type of DOS

attack where multiple compromised systems -- which are usually Robert McKenzie Page |2

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infected with a Trojan -- are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Victims of a DDoS attack consist of both the end targeted system and all systems maliciously used and controlled by the hacker in the distributed attack.

Specialized On-Premises Equipment. This is similar to Do It Yourself in that an

enterprise is doing all the work to stop the attack, but instead of relying on scripts or an existing firewall, they purchase and deploy dedicated DDoS mitigation appliances. These are specialized hardware that sit in an enterprises data center in front of the normal servers and routers and are specifically built to detect and filter the malicious traffic.

Pharming - Pharming is a cyber-attack intended to redirect a website's traffic to another,

bogus site. Pharming can be conducted either by changing the hosts file on a victim's computer or by exploitation of a vulnerability in DNS server software. DNS servers are computers responsible for resolving Internet names into their real IP addresses. Compromised DNS servers are sometimes referred to as "poisoned". Pharming requires unprotected access to target a computer, such as altering a customer's home computer, rather than a corporate business server. The term "pharming" is a neologism based on the words "farming" and "phishing". Phishing is a type of social-engineering attack to obtain access credentials, such as user names and passwords. In recent years, both pharming and phishing have been used to gain information for online identity theft. Pharming has become of major concern to businesses hosting ecommerce and online banking websites.

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Safety and security when setting up a web blog

When setting up a web blog you shouldnt release your personal information such as your address, postal code or full name as people can use these to find you, get to where you live or find things to blackmail you with such as pictures from Facebook, even giving out your email address can be a bad thing to do. Id recommend that you use a fake post code and fake address if you do intend to put them on a blog, it helps keep you safe, or just plain dont give our your personal details as this is the best method that can be used to keep you safe from people online. Always use a username and password to log into your blog,

Security of data being transferred

I will show you the different types of protection against viruses and other threats below.

Firewalls
A firewall protects you against:

Hackers breaking into your computer. Worms types of viruses that spread from computer to computer over the internet. Some outgoing traffic originating from a virus infection.

What a firewall does NOT do: A firewall isnt sufficient on its own to guarantee security, but it is the first line of defense. You also need to take the other protective steps outlined on this website. However, a firewall provides limited or no protection against the following:

If you give permission for other computers to connect to yours. If it is switched off, disabled or contains many exceptions or open ports. Most viruses. Spam. Page |4

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Spyware installations. Any kind of fraud or criminal activity online. If you or a virus has created a back door through the firewall. People with physical access to your computer or network. Data introduced to the computer other than online, e.g. via USB connected devices, CD/DVD etc. Attacks after a network has been compromised. Traffic that appears to be legitimate.

However, none of these things give a reason NOT to install a firewall, as this alone is not enough for complete security. It is safest to assume that your internet service provider does NOT provide any kind of firewall, so make sure you have the right software to protect yourself. Types of firewalls Personal firewalls: Personal firewalls should be installed on each computer that is connected to the internet and monitors (and blocks, where necessary) internet traffic. They are also sometimes known as software firewalls or desktop firewalls. Windows Firewall is a basic personal firewall. It is free, included with Windows operating systems. In Windows 8, Windows 7 and Vista, the Firewall defaults to active, so you do not need to worry about configuring it yourself. If you wish, you could replace Windows Firewall with another personal firewall of your choice, including the type incorporated in some internet security packages, or standalone firewall software which can be downloaded from the internet, some of which is free of charge. Hardware firewalls Medium-sized and large businesses may need a hardware firewall in addition to personal firewalls depending on the configuration of their IT infrastructure. Your internal or external IT support resource will be able to recommend, source, install and configure the most suitable one for your business needs.

Anti-virus software
Anti-virus software is designed to stop bad programs from entering your computer and doing serious or little damage to the system or your data. It stops such things as worms, Trojans and more. It can help detect and stop viruses before theyve gained access to important parts of the computer. You can use some anti-virus software to scan programs, e-mail attachments and such things before you even open or use them. This is a good idea considering how dangerous some of them can actually be to your computer. You also need to constantly upgrade it since new viruses are made and old ones updated every day. You will need to update the software so it can fight against the new/upgraded viruses that will attempt to gain access to your computer. Some types of anti-virus software will allow you to do a full scan of your computer to search for any little hidden programs or things that may be malicious software.

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Anti-spyware
Anti-spyware software are programs that attempt to remove or block spyware Malicious programs that try and collect small pieces of information without the computer owners knowledge and may change settings, make your computer run slowly or affect other programs installed. They can combat spyware in two ways: 1. The software may attempt to provide real time protection against the installation of spyware software on your computer. This works in a similar way to that of antivirus protection in that anti-spyware scans all incoming network data for known spyware software and blocks any threats it discovers. 2. The more common and popular method of protection is the use of anti-spyware programs to detect and remove spyware that has already been installed onto your computer. The software typically presents you with a list of any threats found, allowing you to choose what you want to delete and what you want to keep.

E-mail attachments
For a start, never read an email sent from someone you dont know or an e-mail address you dont recognize or were not expecting an e-mail from. If there is an attachment in an email for example an .exe file. NEVER open it because 9 out of 10 times it will be a virus lying in wait for you to open it and activate it. Once this is done youll have infected your computer with whatever the virus is. Any kind of executable files or application type files are more than likely bad for your computer or your data. Dont open them.

Downloading files from the internet

When downloading files from the internet it would be smart to scan them first with antivirus software before installing them onto your computer. Anytime you download an .exe file definitely scan it in case it turns out to be something bad such as a virus. Regular backups of data regularly backing up your data is a good way to make sure you never lose any, because of even if something happens and you lose your data you can just back up to a certain point.

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Legislation

DPA - The Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) is a United Kingdom Act of Parliament which defines UK
law on the processing of data on identifiable living people. It is the main piece of legislation that governs the protection of personal data in the UK. Although the Act itself does not mention privacy, it was enacted to bring UK law into line with the EU data protection directive of 1995 which required Member States to protect people's fundamental rights and freedoms and in particular their right to privacy with respect to the processing of personal data. In practice it provides a way for individuals to control information about themselves. Most of the Act does not apply to domestic use, for example keeping a personal address book. Anyone holding personal data for other purposes is legally obliged to comply with this Act, subject to some exemptions. The Act defines eight data protection principles. It also requires companies and individuals to keep personal information to themselves. - The act contains eight Data Protection Principles. These specify that personal data must be: 1. Processed fairly and lawfully. 2. Obtained for specified and lawful purposes. 3. Adequate, relevant and not excessive. 4. Accurate and up to date. 5. Not kept any longer than necessary. 6. Processed in accordance with the data subjects (the individuals) rights. 7. Securely kept. 8. Not transferred to any other country without adequate protection in situ.

Computer misuse act - The Computer Misuse Act 1990 is a law passed by the
British government. It was introduced to try to fight the growing threat of hackers and hacking. The law has three parts. In the U.K., it is now a crime to

Access a computer without permission Access a computer without permission, hoping to break another law. Change, break or copy files without permission. Page |7

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People who break this law can be jailed for up to 6 months.

Copyright - Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most

governments, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time, with the intention of enabling the creator of intellectual wealth (e.g. the photographer of a photograph or the author of a book) to receive compensation for their work and be able to financially support themselves. Plagiarism - Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work. The idea remains problematic with unclear definitions and unclear rules.

Plagiarism Plagiarism is when someone has used someone

elses work or software without their permission. In educational areas, plagiarism is considered academic dishonesty. For example, copying work from a friend to save yourself doing it. This is considered plagiarism. As a result this can lead to credit being given to the wrong people, and can also result to the people not being given what theyre deserved. It is also seen a crime is done to a major degree.

Bibliography Pharming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharming Cyber-Bullying http://spunout.ie/opinion/atricle/the-ask.fm-controversy Phishing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing Distributed Denial of Service - http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/DDoS_attack.html and http://whatismyipaddress.com/ddos-attack Copyright - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

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