Potential Security Threats

From the moment the computer is on and connected to the Internet it`s at risk from malicious programs that can annoy, collect personal information, download and install on their own, and send information to an attacker. In fact, personal computers are more vulnerable to a lot of security thread that can cause severe damage to the person`s identity and significant losses. Personal computers, such as laptops, became very common and portable nowadays. People are on the move and take their laptops with them everywhere. As a result, people need to be careful to what network they are connecting to. We are surrounded by so many networks that could not be equally trustworthy. In general, a personal computer on the Internet is at risk from a variety of security threads, such as viruses, worms, Trojan horses, buffer-overflow attacks, spyware, and phishing.

One of the potential threads to a personal computer is a virus. Virus could be downloaded from the internet by mistake, received as an email attachment, received through the instant messaging, installed from USB drives, or installed by script from opened email. Generally speaking, viruses are designed to spread from one computer to another by replicating itself. Consequences of the virus include but not limited to join the computer to a botnet, corrupt or delete data on your system, erase everything on the computer, and email itself to other computers by using victim`s address book. Another thread is a worm. It very similar to a virus but in order to get executed it doesn’t require human interaction at all. Worms can spread over the network by identifying the IP addresses of other computers and then try to exploit an open port to infect other computers. In addition, worms generate a lot of traffic in the network that leads to a poor performance of the whole network. Another potential thread is a Trojan horse. Trojan horse is malicious software that usually embedded within another application, such as a game or utility....