In this post we are looking at two different ways your personal data can be breached and how easily damaged your computer is to a hacker.
Every day we use a device that connects to the internet, and we go through scrolling and downloading with a sense of ease. While we search for things on websites or use google, we leave our computer and data up for grabs as we investigate what might be happening in the news or on a blog. We travel through the internet without a sense of precaution, and it can be risky depending on what we are looking at or for. Things that can happen are our personal data can be taken from just searching the internet, we get random emails about things we did not want to buy or services that are just scams and more. So, clicking on one of these emails or a link to a site to download something can lead to worse issues for your phone, computer, or even your tablet. A virus can be downloaded and infect your computer stealing files, passwords, and more from your computer without you knowing about it. One thing that has happened to me while I was playing a game was an attack on my computer through pinging and that was a ddos attack.
Ping flood attack that was causing an overwhelming about of requests and slowing my connection to a halt when playing league of legends. Now there is a lot that can happen to your computer so you should be aware of what to do to prevent issues like viruses or email spam from happening. In the textbook we learn that computer viruses are programs that most often get on a person's computer by downloading something from an email, it runs on a computer infecting it and spreading it throughout the network it is attached to. (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019, Chapter 8, Section 2). Computer viruses can be easy to prevent and easy to take care of. Two ways this can happen is through antivirus software or if you know when it was downloaded a system recovery the day before. If that does not work if you can find the file that was downloaded, then deleting it yourself can get rid of it as well. But there might be a side effect, or something could happen when you do get a virus.
The virus could affect your hard drive or something that is attached like a portable hard drive and that is infected and needs to be taken care of as well. (Ehsan, et al.,2023). Now when we investigate email spam, we can see that the email you are using most of the time will filter out spam into a separate folder so you can shift through it and delete what is spam and what is not. But our email is something we use to login to websites so this information can be found through data breaches at websites or companies. This happened to PlayStation when they had a security attack in 2011 where a lot of information was taken by hackers. But that information gets sold off to scammers and hackers to send you spam emails and try to break into your personal information. A few ways in which you can prevent spamming of your email is filtering which can be an effective tool in most email accounts today. (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019, Chapter 6, Section 6). Another is unsubscribing from the email chain; this is something I have been doing to lower the amount of spam I am getting. When looking into spam I found an article that talked about by 2025 the average emails daily being sent and received will hit around 376.4 billion, and the percentage of those being spam is 85%. (Sesha et al., 2023). Now that there are a lot of emails that are not trustworthy trying to obtain your information.
Computers are vulnerable to each of these threats because of how much personal information is left unprotected, we all want to keep our personal lives protected and private. A computer does come with a basic level of protection through the operating system you have. So, having something on top of that is important. I have used in the past a lot of different antivirus software like Norton, Avast, McAfee, Bitdefender, Malwarebytes, and Advanced SystemCare. All of them are either paid for or free and get the job done. I hope this information has kept you informed and up to date if you want my opinion on any of that antivirus software, I will be happy to give you my honest opinion.
References
Ehsan, M. S., Rafiq, M., & Raza, A. (2023). A Competitive Numerical Model for Virus Transmission in a Computer Network. 2023 4th International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies (ICoMET), Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies (ICoMET), 2023 4th International Conference On, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/iCoMET57998.2023.10099088
Sesha Sai Krishna Vineeth, G. V., Leela Venkata Sai, M., Mahesh, M. U., Varun, M., & Shanmugapriya, S. (2023). Email Spam: A New Strategy of Screening Spam Emails using Natural Language Processing. 2023 Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Smart Energy (ICAIS), Artificial Intelligence and Smart Energy (ICAIS), 2023 Third International Conference On, 710–715. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICAIS56108.2023.10073758
Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. ZyBooks.
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