The Threat of Online Security: How Safe Is Our Data?

Internet has become a critical infrastructure between one another. An individual may use the internet to make their payment while the corporate may use it to deal with their customers or suppliers. Thus, there are a lots personnel and confidential data involved during the transaction.

In e-commerce, online security always been question by the users especially the rate of threat in online security increased recently. Those threats may refer to malicious codes which are virus, Trojan horses and worms. Viruses are the best known in the malicious code categories. It is a piece of software code that inserts itself into an operating system in order to propagate it. However, it does not run independently. It required user to move them from one machine to another.

Then, Trojan horse is a program that appears to have a useful function but in fact it contains a hidden function that presents a security risk. It normally will give the attacker some degree of control over the user’s machine. This control allows the attacker to remotely access and commands to the user’s machine. The data that usually targeted by Trojan horse are usernames and passwords. In addition, Trojan horse may also make the user’s machine become part of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) network where they used to attack other users.

Worm is a type of malicious code that runs independently. It consumes resources of its host and it is capable of propagating the complete working version of itself into another machine. This mean once the worm has attacks the machine and take it over, the worm itself will scan for and attack other machine. Thus, there is not human intervention is required to spread a worm across a network. Besides, the entire process only takes seconds or less to spread over thousand of machines.

In nutshell, proper safeguards should be undertaken by the user to protect their data. They may download antivirus program or any other program to guard against those security problems.

Related info:-

http://www.infosecwriters.com/text_resources/pdf/Mal_Codes_in_Depth.pdf