Daniel’s Internet Saftey Blog

One website which allows you to download software legally is youtube. Youtube is used to allow anyone with access to the internet to upload there own home videos without being famous. Most videos aren’t good quality as some low mega pixel cameras are used to make the videos. The videos are free to download without any fees.

Another website that allows you to download videos legally is itunes. Itune movies are priced but they are video’s which are contained in a cinema bit you can watch them in the comfort of your home without travelling. The movies are high quality so your getting what you pay for as there aren’t any faulty movies.

Phishing works by a fraudster setting up a fake or spoof web site that is similar, or identical to a actual real web site, for example, a bank. An e-mail is then sent to many people informing them that they must go to this website link in the e-mail and type in important information. The e-mail may tell them that if they fail to do this then they may end up losing money or that their bank account will not be secure and may at risk of losing your identity

• Anti-Virus software is used to stop unwanted viruses attacking your computer and maintain your systems full performance. Two examples of anti virus software are Shield Deluxe and Norton. Shield Deluxe contains Antivirus and Antispyware Software, Real-Time Virus Scanning, System Restoration and Instant Message Protection. Norton offers Anti-Virus protection Automatic Scans Smart Scanning but has its downfall of taking up large spaces of data and dramatically slows down your systems performance.

• A firewall is a form of Internet defence. A firewall’s purpose is to monitor and block any perceived threat from the Internet to the local system. Windows Firewalls Windows Defender – what it does – Help block computer viruses and worms from reaching your computer. But the main disadvantage of Windows Defender is that it does not detect or disable computer viruses and worms if they are already on your computer. For that reason Microsoft give the advice to download anti-virus software and keep it updated to help prevent unwanted, spy ware, viruses, Trojans etc from being present on your system . Disadvantages: are similar to that of windows defender as it will not perform scans on your system. But you can upgrade your software to the Zone Alarm complete security suite. This will protect your system in everyway, including anti-virus, security suite and others.

 

Spam

Spammers find out peoples email addresses by 8using many tricks such as guessing popular names and sending mail with hyper links attached to them. will e-mail everyone and anyone and as a result spam arrives in most people’s inboxes. Spammers are used to sell products to people who probarly do even want any of the products they have to sell and items that are worhless to there intrest. Spammers share email so they can advertise more products to people but you can prevent this by using anti-spam software. You can mark the email as spam and you won’t recieve any more emails from this sender so there wont be any hastle.

Another threat to Internet security and safety is the use of key logging software. Key Loggers are programs designed to capture and record every key you press, including your passwords and confidential information, such as bank account and credit card details. This could cause you to lose lots of money and let the hackers make fake i.d and will now if your goin on holiday so they can rob your house.

The rogue dialler software, once downloaded, acts in a similar way to a virus, but with the purpose of disconnecting a system’s modem from its usual Internet Service Provider and reconnecting it to another ISP. The user is then billed at a much higher rate for Internet access.

Adware is any software that causes unwanted adverts to appear when a user is using their system. Adware is also another type of malware that is causing a lot of bother and becoming a major nuisance. Pop-ups may mean the user needs to close the windows everytime they enter a new site or maybe even turning off there syste. 

Adware is generally regarded as more of a nuisance than a danger because it doesn’t damage the user’s system, it simply disrupts a user when they are using their browser.

Adware can be dealt with in a similar way to spyware and a very popular program that can be used to deal with it is Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition.

Drive-by downloads are programs that are automatically sent to your computer when you visit certain websites or view HTML e-mail messages. The download happens without your consent and is a very common method for spyware and adware to get on your system.

Anti-Spyware – Once the anti-spyware has been installed it can be set to scan the system for spyware that can be deleted. There are generally two types of scan that can be carried out, a Quick Scan or a Deep Scan. Deep scans are more usfull as it looks into more files with depth and it will more accurate with searchies.

There are many viruses.

These are called File infector viruses e.g. these infect program files, such as applications, games or utilities.

 Boot sector viruses e.g. Boot sector viruses attach themselves to this program Multi-partite or polypeptide viruses these infect both boot records and program files and are very difficult to repair

Macro viruses: these infect data files, such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, rather than programs. They are very common and can be difficult and expensive to repair

Trojans normally claim to do something useful but are actually malicious. One major difference between Trojans and true viruses is that they do not replicate. Trojans contain malicious code that can cause loss or theft of data. Trojans must be invited onto your computer, e.g.: by opening an email attachment or downloading and running a file. Trojan. Un.do is an example.

There are two types of Trojan:

• A program that pretends to do something useful but is actually a virus

• A real program that has been altered to contain a virus

Trojans differ from other types of virus in that rather than attaching themselves to existing programs they are complete programs in themselves.

Worms replicate themselves from computer to computer without infecting a host program, unlike viruses, which must be carried by a host. Although worms are often carried inside another file, usually a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, they use the program in a different way from a virus.

A worm will usually release a document that already has the worm macro inside it. The entire document travels from system to system, so the entire document should be regarded as a worm. It was designed to allow spammers to send spam e-mail from infected computers

Like Trojans, worms are self contained programs that are designed to copy themselves from computer to computer. A common purpose of worms is to install a backdoor into a computer. These programs gain access to your computer.

Logic Bombs are designed to cause harm to your computer. Logic bombs, however, only trigger when specific conditions are met. For example a computer programmer may insert code into a payroll program that deletes files if her name is not found on the list. This means that files will be deleted if she is ever fired..

Other viruses, called time bombs, may only detonate on a specific date or time. An example of this is the Jerusalem virus.

On a Microsoft Windows computer a .SCR file is a screen saver. As screen savers are just computer programs they are a useful way of inserting a virus into your computer. Typically SCR viruses come as an attachment to an e-mail which shows a funny picture which you can click.

Once clicked the virus then installs itself onto your computer. As the SCR file pretends to be something else it is another example of a Trojan.

Perhaps the most famous example of a SCR virus is the SOBIG worm, which installed software to send spam.

Image viruses cannot cause any damage to a computer by themselves. Instead the code they contain exploits problems in other programs. An infected image, transferred to your computer on a web page, in a document or in a chat window could access your system and plant a virus.

Images are not usually seen as a threat, so these viruses are not stopped by normal anti-virus software

The viruses stay in a computer’s memory ready to attack program that is run on the computer. These are resident, or memory-resident, viruses.

The concept of a resident virus is simple. A computer can run several programs at the same time. This is called multi-tasking. At any moment there may be various programs such as a word processor, a web browser and a media player running simultaneously.

A resident virus is written to take advantage of multi-tasking. However, unlike other programs, however, resident viruses hide in a system’s Random Access Memory (RAM), waiting to be activated when something happens, such as when a user clicks a mouse to start a program. In this way they can easily infect other programs.

As soon as new viruses are created, anti-virus software is created to neutralise and remove them. Virus writers have adopted various strategies to fool anti-virus software. One of the most popular and successful ways of fooling anti-virus software is to create a stealth virus.

Stealth viruses contain code that inserts itself between the operating system and the anti-virus software. Whenever a check is made for a virus, the stealth virus tells the operating system that there is no problem. This means the virus is still active and may cause lots of various problems to your system.

A mail bomb is a form of denial of service attack. The idea is to flood someone’s system with more e-mail than it can cope with. There are two ways to make a mail bomb. The first is to send millions of e-mails to one address simultaneously and send small compressed files that, when decompressed, expand to extremely large files.

A backdoor is a way of accessing a computer without going through the normal access routines, such as entering a name and password. It can be installed by a virus.

This is used to conceal programs or files to help hackers avoid detection which may cause many problems to your identity.