Week 8: Security and Protecting Yourself on the Internet
What is Internet Security? It involves establishing rules and measures to use against attacks over the Internet. The Internet is often an insecure channel for exchanging information, exposing it to threats of intrusion or fraud, which can be done in various ways: 1. Malicious Software: A computer user can be tricked or forced into downloading software onto a computer that is of malicious intent. Such software comes in many forms, such as viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, and worms. 2. Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks: This is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. This generally consists of the concerted efforts to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Attackers commonly target cloud computing environments like organizations and governments. 3. Phishing: This is an attack which targets online users for extraction of their sensitive information such as username, password and cre...