Internet Security - Week 9

If you are a frequent web surfer or browser, internet security is definitely something that a user should neglect. Negligence on internet security can cause a user a lot of problems and if serious can even end up as police cases.When we talk about internet security, we are talking about firewalls, virus protections, internet scams such as phishing, spams and many many more.

Without the help of virus protection softwares such as Norton Anti-Virus, AVG anti-virus, users

are much more prone and susceptible to viruses. It was said that the are millions of viruses online, if we go online without the use of firewall and anti-virus softwares, we will be said to be playing with fire, exposing ourselves to the million of viruses out there and before we know it, we may be hit with one which can cause your computer to malfunction, depending on the severity of the virus.

However, viruses do not necessary have immediate impact on the computer, some can take a few days, or ever a few years to act up. Speaking of which, some viruses are also less prominent or visible than the other. Take phishing and spyware for instances, which works hand in hand. Phishing is defined as "a form of internet fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit cards, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords.." Malicious websites that you stumble upon will secretly 'plant' and spyware into your computer, so when you enter personal information into forms, these spywares will be able to obtain this information. When fallen onto the hands of evil, these personal and private information can be used against um such as credit card theft and etc. Hence, when we install firewalls, anti-viruses softwares, we will be better protected against such harms like these. However these softwares are also not 100% foolproof.

The advice to safe online practices when disclosing personal information is for you to clear your cache and delete browsing history. Also, we should keep our virus softwares up to date and do a full system scan at least once ever fortnight . It would be good to install a software such as Ad-Aware because this is a software which helps you to clear all those spywares planted in your computer.