Some Common Security Threats and Their Prevention

Online Security

Security is one of the main problems while working on the internet and despite of many preventive measures hacker get their place to affect the security of the important data and information. Mostly the activities we perform on the internet give way to hackers to affect the security and in this article I am going to tell you some of the daily online activities which can affect the privacy of your data and the messages which we send online.

1. 

   Photo by Trpster*

   Many of the electronic messages which we send online includes the links that have been shortened by the service providers and those short links are mostly vulnerable to attacks. For example bit.ly, tr.im, Go.ogl. The major reason for the vulnerability of these links is that they give no direct hint of the destination and hacker can easily take them to the wrong destination. To avoid such attacks install a plug-in named ‘URL preview’ which is available in most of the web browsers and in that plug-in you can change the short URL into the complete one by enabling the preview service which will let you see the complete URL and enable that as well.

2. Some of the personal details which you might share on the social networking sites such as home town or birthday etc. are the one which are the secret questions for your bank and confidential websites. A hacker can get such information from the social networking sites and get the private data from the confidential sites as well so in order to avoid this check the privacy setting of your social networking sites and make your information preview able only for friends. Another way is not to give such information on the social networking sites as it’ll make you carefree from the hackers and if you can’t do this then don’t add strangers to your friend list. Special attention should be given to your social networking profile otherwise you never know who will negatively use your data.
3. Another way by which you can be tricked is that a hacker can send message to your mobile that appear to be coming from your financial institution and by responding to those messages you can be directed to the malicious sites that will change the settings of your phone and let the attacker to enter in it. The solution to check the authenticity of such messages by exiting the text message application and contacting the customer service representative about this new promotion.
4. The use of Wi-Fi is very common now days and attackers sometimes set up a malicious open Wi-Fi network to lure unsuspecting users into connecting and once you get trapped into that network hacker can control all your traffic and get the confidential information. A solution to check for such fake Wi-Fi providers always find out the SSID of the establishment network which is basically the name of that network for example the SSID for network at McDonalds might be ‘mickeyds’ and hacker can trap you by naming his network as ‘mcdwifi’. So it is very necessary to get yourself aware of the Wi-Fi which you are using.
5. The portability of laptops and mobile phones is a very convenient thing now days but apart from this convenience such devices can be easily stolen and if your device gets into wrong hands users may access the sensitive or we can say confidential data. For the prevention of such cases Microsoft has provided an application named as BitLocker to encrypt the data but unfortunately it is available only for Vista and Windows 7 but another very effective such application is also available for Windows and that is the TrueCrypt and it can also effectively encrypt your data like any other efficient encryption software.

These were some of the threads which we face in our daily life and a little attention can let us make secure our data and information. One thing which should be remembered while doing work online is that don’t give your personal data to strangers because with that you can get into problems which you might never have thought before.

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Tags: antivirus, browser security, network security, online security, security threats