Threats of Online Security: How Safe is Our Data?

Internet has become a critical infrastructure between one another. As we know, online is a common activity nowadays. It is useful, but do all of us know how safe actually we are using this facility? Today, we need to worry about security for our personal computer in a whole different way. Spyware, adware, viruses and trojans are lurking online, waiting to infect our computer.
Here is a list of some security threats that we should be aware of, for preventing any such attacks to our PC.


Identity Theft
Identity theft is a crime used to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits. The term is relatively new and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it. The person whose identity is used can suffer various consequences when he or she is held responsible for the perpetrator's actions. In many countries specific laws make it a crime to use another person's identity for personal gain.


Phishing
In the field of computer security, Phishing is a criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT Administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail or instant messaging,[1] and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one.


Social Engineering
Social engineering is a term that describes a non-technical kind of intrusion that relies heavily on human interaction and the act of obtaining or attempting to obtain otherwise secure data by conning an individual into revealing secure information. For example, a person using social engineering to break into a computer network would try to gain the trust of someone who is authorized to access the network in order to get them to disclose information that compromises the network's security.


Hacker Attack
Hacker is a computer program that tries to break into others’ computer systems and specialized in the discovery of exploits in systems or prevented unauthorized access to systems. Using public shared computers to carry out bank transactions can be easily become a victim of hacker. Past few years, hackers have worked together with organized crime to harvest the valuable data exposed on the Internet.


Spam Mail
E-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail, is a type of spam that involves sending identical or nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. E-mail spam has steadily, even exponentially grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. Most of the time, E-mail addresses are collected from chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses.

Followings are some of the brief advices that may prevent users from online security threat:

• Don't give away any valuable or sensitive personal information on internet or within messages to other members of the network.

• Use one of the many antivirus, antispyware, and firewall programs on the market.

• Pay attention to the messages from Windows that pop up on your screen, which often contain helpful security information that many users overlook.

• Turn on Windows' automatic-update function to get Microsoft's regular security patches.

Let's keep our mind clear to be alert to those online threat and not to be the next victim!