WHY INTERNET SECURITY IS IMPORTANT?

After hearing recently some news related to computer security problems in large companies, it may be interesting to address some concepts related to this matter.

What Is Internet Security?

Internet security is that the application of data security to the sector of computing and applies both to information stored on computers and to information transmitted over the communications network, such as the internet.

Because It Is Important?

The value of the information itself must be kept in mind. Let's think about bank details, passwords, photos or even our hobbies. All this is very important and must be protected, because there is always the possibility that someone outside of us misuses it.

Technologies Used Against Internet Security

We can classify the technologies used against internet security into two large groups: Social and Technical.

In the case of social technologies, great computer skills aren't needed. They are supported applying deception methods to computing and always require the voluntary intervention of the user of the system.

The technical engineering does require high knowledge about computer and, unlike social type technologies don't require the intervention of the user of the system.

Phishing

Phishing is the typical example of a social security attack. It consists of the impersonation of a trusted entity through a link in the email in order to obtain the credentials. The user receives an email that features logos or images that have been collected from the actual website to which the fraudulent message refers and with the request that they click on a link in the email. This link will take us to a fake website and ask for our credentials.

The main advice to protect yourself from phishing is to never access web pages through links provided by email.

Malware

Viruses, Trojans and worms belong to the category of technical engineering and would allow taking control of remote computers or modifying their operation and capturing information (Keyloggers).

The Keyloggers are specific tools designed to record keystrokes keyboard of a computer to save them in a file and send it via internet. Thanks to this program, criminals can steal a large volume of confidential information without the victim being aware of it.

To protect ourselves from malware, we must avoid downloading and installing unknown programs. It is very important to keep the operating system and all installed programs up to date.

Pharming

Pharming requires advanced computer skills and consists of modifying the information provided by DNS to impersonate a trusted entity.

The pharming is a form of online fraud very similar to phishing in that fake websites are used, but unlike phising not required that the victim accepts a message "decoy" as pharming redirects its victims to the site Fake web, even if you correctly type the web address of your bank or other online service in your internet browser.

How does our computer know which IP address corresponds to the bank's website that we just put in the Internet browser? The first thing it does is consult a file of the operating system, generally called hosts , where it stores some IP addresses widely used by our equipment, and if it does not have it, it makes a query to our service provider (the one that gives us Internet access) and it tells you what the IP address is.

The most common way of suffering a pharming attack is due to someone accessing our computer and replacing our hosts file with false IP addresses. Therefore, the best way to protect our system against these attacks is to have a good antivirus installed and to keep it updated.

Man in the Middle (MITM)

It consists of capturing the traffic between sender and receiver to obtain information. For example, in an email MITM attack, the attacker could redirect all emails to an alternate address or modify the information before sending it to the correct recipient.

Another example we can have when we connect our Smartphone to an unencrypted Wi-Fi network, the attacker could have access to everything we do.

The best way to protect yourself against these attacks is to connect through known and secure networks and check the validity of the certificates provided by the browsers.

Conclusion

Much of the computer security is within our backup on cloud, ensuring that our computers have the latest operating system and antivirus updates installed and not downloading and installing programs from websites that we do not trust.