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Most of you will have heard
about hacker attacks, danger on the net, virus, etc.
Most of this news is with no
doubt exaggerated (apparently written by people that have not a great
knowledge of the matter), often intended for catching your attention
(creating alarm)... anyway... the risk that all this could induce to us
is -strange enough- the opposite: once we have understood about the
exaggerations of the alarms, we could relax, and consider all these
warnings like a danger for other people, and not for us.
It is not so. If you buy a
new car and park it in a big town, opened and without any
security system, what do you think will happen? If afterwards you
begin to cry, saying that someone has stolen your new car, what do you
think that other people will say to you? That you are unlucky? Or rather
that you are not 'very smart' (maybe in a less kind way)?
With Internet we can say
almost the same. The Net is more similar to the world than we could
think, even in risks. There can be thing we should watch out.
1) Children protection
and
internet filter. It is important protecting our children from the
great offer of pornography that can be found on the web. For this reason
the best thing to do is using a software as 'internet filter'. When your
browser finds in a site some 'suspicious word', locks immediately the
access to the page. In this way only the owner of the pc (the one with
the password) can navigate as he likes; the others will not be able to
browse sites with adult material.
2)
Spyware. In many
adware applications there are some files that install on your pc and
begin to send information's (to companies that collect and sell datas,
marketing, etc.), about your behaviours on internet, about what kind of
products you buy, etc. These are not dangerous apps, but the idea of
being spied -without our explicit consent and for purposes we do not
know- can hassle many people (for example it hassles me). The solution
is using SpyBot
(100% free), and remove the spyware from our pc. Even a firewall can be
effective, but without SpyBot you will have never ending warnings of attacks
to your pc, that will make harder your browsing in the web. (what
is spyware?)
3) Some accesses from your
provider. Sometimes your provider could try to connect to your pc.
In this case there is no danger (anyway some firewall, to be sure, will
stop even those).
4) Attacks. The
chance your pc is attacked is higher of how you could think. With no
doubt most of these attacks will be harmless, or at most annoying, but
in some cases these attacks can be extremely harmful: there are clients
able to steal important info from your pc, and even worse. These apps
kind of viruses are generally called trojan, and could -in some cases-
take full control of your pc (exploring any directory or file,
formatting partitions, etc.). There are even clients, called
keyloggers, that hide somewhere in your pc and write in a file
every word you type on your keyboard, everything, from email to the
number of your Credit Card, to send them through the net at the right
moment. The chance a similar thing can happen to you is quite remote,
anyway it does exist and is already happened to many people.
There are many freeware and
shareware applications that enable hackers, crackers and vandals (as
they are called) to automatically scan the IPs of a provider, to find
the ones with opened ports (exactly like a thief with cars). If your pc
has not a good defence system, could be controlled or damaged from the
hacker. This is NOT easy to do, and thankfully not many people are able
to do this, but not impossible.
In any case it is good being
prepared.
The kind of protection you
need depends by the time you spend on the web and by the operations you
generally perform: if you never use credit card, if you never perform
any kind of financial activity online (like bank accounts, stocks,
etc.), if you never look for dangerous sites (like some free adult
sites, of sites of cracks, etc.), if you have not a permanent connection
like DSL/ADSL, and maybe you stay connected for 30-40 minutes per day,
than the risks are very low. A good antivirus may be enough.
Vice versa if you perform
some financial operations online (like using a credit card), an
antivirus is not enough. You must have even a good firewall.
PLEASE NOTE: Peer to
peer applications of file sharing (like kazaa, winmx, imesh,
edonkey, morpheus, etc.) are extremely risky about attacks. Generally
people with bad intentions use these clients to install trojans on your
pc. You must absolutely have an updated firewall (and a good antivirus).
At this point someone will ask: It is
safe shopping online with a credit card? Generally it is so. In these years (thanks to hackers, that have pressed big
companies to invest money on online security) the data protection (128 bit
encryption) has greatly increased, and the general online security has
improved; online data stealing are less (though people who make shopping
online are more). Of course it is not impossible stealing the number of
credit cards, but today this is more difficult. As a general rule, you
should avoid to give your codes to sites that appear suspicious, or anyway
on pages that do not begin with 'https:' (there is a 's' at the end).
Overall the risks of using a Credit Card online are equal or less
(generally less) than using it in the daily life.
(antivirus and personal firewall)
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