Internet Security Threats

This paper is going to be on the different security threats on the internet, and the different ways to prevent and protect yourself from them. The different

threats that are going to be covered are viruses, trojan horses, hackers, spam, corrupt IP packets, port scanner attacks, DOS(denial of service) attacks, spider

attacks, worms and socail attacks. Also, I will cover different security practices and computer software and hardware that can help protect and prevent these

different attacks on your computer, or network. Many people use the words virus, trojan, and worm interchangeably when talking about attacks on their computer,

but in reality, they are different types of attacks, this paper will define and differentiate between the different types of attacks a computer can become a victim of.

A virus is software thats used to infect and damage a computer. The code for the virus is usually imbedded into an existing program so that once the program

that has the virus inbedded into is executed, the virus code activates and copies itself, it then attaches the copies of itself to other existing programs that exist on the

system. Viruses may be simple pranks that just cause messeges to randomly pop up on the screen, but they can also be very damaging to a computer. Viruses tha

damage computers destroy programs and/or data right away when they're activated, or on a certain date. There are some viruses that remain dormant and do its

damage once a year. One example of this type of virus is the Michelangelo virus, a virus that usually only attacks MS-DOS systems, but can cause an equal amount

of damage to other operating sytems, which only infects computers on Michelangelo's birthday. Compute...

... middle of paper ...

...ckets coming into the computer were requested by the user. A firewall can usually examine multiple different layers of the protocol stack, which makes it possible to block packets at any layer or depth. Besides software firewalls, other type of software can protect your computer from viruses, and other types of attacks is antivirus protection. There are many different brands of antivirus protection, but the most popular brands are Norton's Antivirus, and MaCafee. The ways an antivirus program protect your computer is by scanning your computer for viruses and other threats. You can also use your antivirus program to scan files that you download off the internet, or that you transfer from other computers, for viruses. The best way to utilize the protection of an antivirus software is to configure it to perform full-system scans at least once a week.