The threat of online security: how safe is our data?

Nowadays, the technology became more and more advance. There are many type of online security to secure our information and data. On the other hand, there are also several of online threat to attack our personal computer, data, and access our system without authorization and permission.

Threat to attack online security:

• A hacker is a person who creates and modifies computer software and hardware, including computer programming, administration, and security-related items. This can be done for either negative or positive reasons. Criminal hackers create malware in order to commit crimes. A virus is a computer program file capable of attaching to disks or other files and replicating itself repeatedly, typically without user knowledge or permission. For example, Hackers broke into the systems of an Ohio hospital. To obtain Personal data of 230,000 patients and their family members plus the financial information of 12,000 donors. It happened when the hospital was upgrading its systems.
  


• Trojan horse is a destructive program that can cause serious damage by deleting files and destroying information on your system. Trojans are also known to create a back door on your computer that gives malicious users access to your system, possibly allowing confidential or personal information to be compromised. Trojans are not same with the virus or worms; they do not copy themselves to other files.
  


• Denial-of-Service (Dos) which is an attack on a web site in which an attacker uses specialized software to send a flood of data packets to the target computer with the aim of overloading its resources. Many attackers rely on software created by other hackers and made available over the internet other than developing it themselves.
  


• web server and web page can be hijacked and configured to control or redirect unsuspecting to scam or phishing sites.
  


• Click fraud occurs when an individual or computer program fraudulently clicks on an online ad without any intention of learning more about the advertiser or making a purchase. Click fraud has became a serious problem at google and other website that feature pay-per-click online advertising.
  


• Worm is a software program that runs independently and consuming the resources of its hosts in orders to maintain itself and capable of propagating a complete working version of itself onto another machine. Therefore, the macro virus or macro worm is a virus or worm that is executed when the application object that contains the macro is opened or a particular procedure is executed
  
  Safeguard for our data
  


• Anti-virus software scans a computer's memory and disk drives for viruses. If it finds a virus, the application informs the user and may clean, delete, or quarantine any files, directories, or disks affected by the malicious code. For example, AVG antivirus
  


• Encryption is the scrambling of data so that it becomes difficult to unscramble and interpret.
  


• A firewall prevents computers on a network from communicating directly with external computer systems. A firewall typically consists of a computer that acts as a barrier through which all information passing between the networks and the external systems must travel. The firewall software analyzes information passing between the two and rejects it if it does not conform to pre-configured rules.

On the other hand, not only these three safeguard, actually is more than that. By the way, there is several way of online security to make sure be safe.

• Trust only yourself, or only do business with the company you know and trust.
  


• Only use your credit card number on internet sites that have a secure, encrypted system.
  


• Once you think something is wrong, leave it immediately, do not follow any of the instructions it present.