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

The threat of online security divides into two types of attack- nontechnical and technical. Nontechnical attacks are using chicanery or some other form of persuasion to trick people into disclosing sensitive information that can be used to compromise the security of a network. Nontechnical attack also known as social engineering, it preys on an individual’s desperate to help and fear of getting into trouble.

They are two categories of social engineering – human based and computer based. Human based social engineering relies on traditional method of communication such as communicate over phone. However, various technical ploys are used to encourage individuals to provide sensitive information in legitimate email form.

In contrast, software and systems knowledge are used to perpetrate technical attack. An expert hacker uses a methodical approach to conduct a technical attack and expose a system’s vulnerabilities over internet easily and freely. In year 1999, common (security) vulnerabilities and exposure (CVE) is established and one of the goals of the CVE list is to assign standard and unique names to each of the known security community throughout of the world.

Since year 2000, National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) has produced a document summarizing the two top 10 lists: the 10 most commonly exploited vulnerabilities in Window and another one in UNIX and Linux. Distributed denial-of-service(DDoS)attacks and malicious code attacks are well know in CVE and NIPC lists and have affected million people.

DoS is an attacks on a Web site in which an attacker uses specialized software to send a flood of data packets the target computer with the aim of overloading its resource. With DDoS attack, the attacker gains illegal administrative access to as many computers on the internet as possible and uses the multiple computers to send a flood of data packets to the target computer. However, malicious code is classified by the way in which it is propagated such as viruses, worms, and Trojan horses. Some malicious code rather than benign, but it all has the potential to do damage. furthermore, we can get some current issues and cases about the internet security in detail from lecturer blog http://ecommerze.blogspot.com/search/label/Internet%20Security.

In my opinion, no matter how confidential and secret of data or information, the criminal can get it easily by using nontechnical or technical attacks if our safeguard or online security is very low, our data no longer safe anymore. A strong online security is needed in order to prevent or minimize the unwelcome person enter our computer or database.