Virus, worm, Trojan horse, phishing, botnet, spam and spoofing are
just a few of the security issues lurking throughout the internet.
Want to know more about them?
Find out about them in this video.
My name is Tim Buchalka from the Learn Programming Academy.
This is my learn to code series here on Youtube.
In this video, I'll talk about internet security.
There are many security issues and challenges, so I'll intentionally
limit our conversation to just covering the basics.
Keep in mind that a whole course or even multiple courses could be
devoted to explaining in detail the ins and outs of internet security.
Have you ever lost or misplaced one of your electronic devices
like a smartphone or tablet?
If yes, then I suspect you felt some sort of panic
in that a good portion of your virtual life is on that device.
When we lose or misplace a device, security often becomes foremost in our minds.
Identity theft, bank account theft, credit or debit card theft,
access to lots of websites that require authentication etc, these are all
issues that we need to think about.
In an earlier video, I mentioned an organization named DARPA.
In the late 1980s, it created the computer emergency response team,
CERT, located at Carnegie-Mellon University in the united states to
be the internet's security watchdog.
This organization makes the public aware of internet
security topics and issues.
This website, www.cert.org.
I want to begin by mentioning spam.
Spam is generally not regarded as malicious software.
However, spam can certainly contain malicious software
attachments or links.
We probably all know what spam is.
Email that typically is not asked for but arrives in our inbox
just about every day and wants us to purchase or do something.
The worldwide amount of spare email is an enormous percentage of the total
email sent daily it's like all the junk mail as i call it delivered daily
to our home by our postal carriers.
When one of our electronic devices is connected to a network of any
size, it opens itself up to potential unauthorized access accessing
vandalism often called attacks.
One very common attack is the use of malicious software, malware, that gets
placed on the device and then executes on our device or is controlled by
some other computer unknowingly to us.
These malware attacks include viruses, worms, Trojan horses and spyware.
So here's my very short explanation of each of these malwares.
All of them are software and I'll use the generic term computer to
represent all our electronic devices.
A virus infects a computer much like a human virus infects
a person by inserting itself into an existing programmer app
that's already on our computer.
When that app executes the virus also executes and can do whatever
its programming directs it to just copying itself to other apps to
degrading the operating system's performance to erasing data etc.
A worm is like a virus, however, it does not attach itself to
an existing app but is its own app that automatically
launches itself and executes.
Its main goal is to replicate itself onto the same or
many different computers.
The replication of itself can degrade a computer's performance and if
it replicates to many different computers the worm can degrade or
overload a portion of the internet, such internet overloads have already
occurred, it can happen at almost any time of security is compromised.
A Trojan horse is software that disguises itself as a
desirable software app such as a game or utility program that
you and I willingly install.
Sometimes the Trojan horse software executes immediately doing its
malicious deeds or it waits until some pre-programmed event such as a future
date and time occurs to launch itself and do its malicious deeds then.
Email attachments are a favorite way to introduce Trojan horses.
The email looks good to the unsuspecting user and so they
click on some exciting looking link to open the attachment and that
starts the Trojan horse process.
My personal guidance with regard to email is to never click or open
attachments sent from unknown persons or even friends unless you are
expecting a specific attachment and.
Even then there's no 100 guarantee so beware.
Spyware has several configurations or types one.
Type sniffing software collects information about activities on a
computer such as a key logger that captures keyboard keystrokes and
sends that information back to the instigator computer for use in some
other destructive or corrupt manner.
Phishing software uses a very simple technique to acquire
information by just asking for it.
The term phishing is a play on the word fishing in which fishermen
have their baited lines in the water hoping the fish will "take the bite."
For example something that happens very often is friends in your
email address book gets sent an email that looks like it's from
you asking for specific information such as the username and password.
We think it's really our friend so we "take the bite" and reply with
the information that was requested.
One final form of spyware that I want to mention is known
as denial of service dos or distributed denial of service ddos.
This type of attack often targets a web server typically some large
commercial one hoping to accumulate so that customers cannot conduct
e-commerce on the web server which hurts its business financially
and even its credibility.
DoS sends huge blocks hundreds of thousands for example of messages to
the web server in a very short amount of time thus overloading it which
denies real customers gaining access.
DdoS does the same thing but uses thousands of infected
computers possibly yours and mine no one collectively has a
botnet to send those messages.
We hear these types of attacks quite frequently.
There are businesses that specialize in helping other businesses,
train its employees to be more aware of malicious threats.
These businesses are contracted to send all kinds of "take the bite"
type of emails to its employees and then the business can determine who
took the bite and even what percentage of the bite was consumed to provide
specific training to its employees to be more on guard in order to prevent
malicious attacks in the future.
Other protections and preventions to guard against malware
include anti-virus software spam filters and firewall software.
Businesses are constantly evaluating newer technologies to protect their
computers and networks and even individuals like yourself have
similar software on your devices.
My recommendation is to keep that software up to date
with the latest revisions.
Security is an ever elusive challenge because the good guys sometimes
called white hats really know where the next attack is coming from and in
what form until it actually happens.
New attack methods emerge then the good guys need to figure out a cure or
fix after the fact so we're always at least one step behind the malware the
bad guys sometimes called black hats.
So this concludes my conversation about the world wide web.
And I hope you picked up on the basics of this fantastic
technology something that you probably use almost every day.
Next up, it's time to swing back into programming.
We're going to be discussing data storage and representation.
You don't want to miss this one check, it out thanks for watching.
See you in the next video.
This is the part of the video where I meant to get all enthusiastic
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and to like the video, leave a comment and all that stuff.
Well, I'm going to leave that decision in your capable hands
to decide whether I've earned a like or a subscriber or a comment.
I'd be grateful if you do one, both or all three.
More videos will get out there in front of a bigger audience if
I get that level of engagement, but obviously it's your choice.
All right, so remember that this series was meant to
be watched in order
So if you haven't watched from the start, then how dare you watch
my video series out of order.
Click the link over here to get to the first video in the series and
watch that if you want to see the entire series in order or come over
here and click to view the previous video in the series again your choice.
All right, I'm done catch you in the next video.