Abuse of IT – viruses, malware, spam, phishing, denial of service attacks etc

Hello, I am a student officially studying IT diploma level 2 and today, I would be talking you through the types of abuse of IT within our computer systems and technologies.

Viruses

A virus is known as a piece of code which loads onto your computer that makes copies by attaching itself to an alternative program. Viruses are similar to Malware and sometimes they have the advantage to change or destroy files and even crash network services. Viruses have the advantage to make an exact copy and reproduce. Viruses spread by many ways by e-mail, computer network or input devices such as a pen drive. You need to make sure that you do not open emails which you don't know where they come from because when you open it, there might


How to avoid a viruses

A way to avoid viruses which affects your computer is by purchasing an anti-virus software and install it onto your computer system. the software would grant you computer protection from viruses which may harm to computer. Some example of a anti-viruses are: McAfee, bit-defender, Norton and etc.

Malware

Malware is a short term of saying Malicious software a software created to specifically disrupt or damage your computer system. You can normally get Malware on your computer system if you go to website's which are unsafe and unsecured. Software's such as Firewall, anti-malware and anti-virus are used to protect and recover from attacks.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware

Spam

Spam is when you have many types of messages in an instance for an example the repeating of a same message multiple times. Spam mostly happen through our junk mail, but they could happen anywhere at any-time and spam is know of taking alot of network bandwidth. Spam does not only acquire within mails, it could also acquire within chat rooms aswell, when some one sends the same message multiple times. A way to avoid Spam is that you do not give people your email address or your telephone number.

 And also another alternative way to avoid Spam is that your have to make sure that you do not reply messages you get from spammers so that those people who send you those messages would think that, that type of email is not in use.




Phishing
Phishing is some type of fraud which happens all the time, it could occur when someone sends you an  email or calls you through the phone, tricking you by claiming that they work for a legit company so that they could still your personal information in terms of that your credit card information, identification and etc.


Phishing also happens through fake website's, criminals intend to create and copy website's with the same exact name so that they could steal details, an example of Bar-clays could be a copied website and people with no IT technical knowledge would think that their on the right website. This is a risk because when you enter you personal banking details onto the website you do not realise is fake, criminals would be able to have a copy of your bank details which would then lead to a lot of problems within the future such as great amount of money loss. A way you could prevent your self been the victim getting scammed by criminals is by having strong passwords.

If your computer is not secured, this would mean that you would have a higher chance of personal information stolen when you are trying to shop on-line.

Original safe Barclays banking website

Http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/phishing.html
Rest of information are from notes from lessons and common thinking.




Denial of service attacks

The meaning of Denial of service is when a hacker disables a server, it is an illegal thing to do, but people intend to do it to annoy people, this could happen any time at any place around the world.  A short way of writing denial of service is DOS.
There are some other types of DOS which  are called "Ping of Death and Tear-drop attack"

                                                 Ping Of Death
Ping of death is a type of DOS attack which is mainly used on a computer which is involves sending a malicious ping to any computer system.

Ping of death attackers are really rare within these days we leave in, because right now, most operation system have been fixed to prevent this type of attack form occurring.

                                                Teardrop attack
A tear-drop attack is a DOS attack and it is when fragmented packets are programmed to overlap on each other when the receiving host tries to reassemble them.

DOS stands for Disk Operation System.

Source:  Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS
Source: Http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/DoS_attack.html
Source: Http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/T/Teardrop_attack.html