Threats of the internet.

Threats

To put it quite bluntly the internet has brought massive problems to do with cyber bullying, hacking and other such things that are in breach of the law.

Cyber Bullying:

I would say from observing for some years that sites like Facebook are nothing but trouble, one opinion someone doesn’t like and you can be hounded by entire groups. It is best to avoid adding people you don’t actually get along with to avoid trouble. The most brutal cyber bullying in my opinion is when you see them verbally abusing someone while everyone films until a fight breaks out. Not only is this illegal but as humans we should be upfront with each other like how it used to be. The internet has brought along a lot of cowardly behaviour; it is even possible to bully someone across another country thanks to the worldwide connectivity.

Denial of service:

Another impact on this subject is denial of service attacks. Denial of service attacks come under the acronym DDoS which means direct denial of service; it means to unlawfully crash somebody’s internet by sending massive amounts of data remotely to their pc without permission. This has been a big problem recently with the online gamer community in which a team of highly skilled hackers have been sent to jail. Before their capture they managed to shut down a few of the world’s largest games for days at a time, not just that though. They managed to hack into airport management and security and rerouted an entire plane. The internet has given rise to a super power of sorts in which the smarter you are with computers, the more dangerous you can be.

Spam & Phishing:

I would say spam and fishing come one in the same. Statistically 75% of the emails I get are spam mail, most of which are connected to phishing sites where the hacker sits and waits for you to read the email, be intrigued and then login with your details to an exact replica of the original webpage.

Spam mail comes from a few different places, the first being hackers of course; spam mail tends to have enticing titles like ‘You have just won £2000!!’ so they can easily take advantage of people who may be desperate or just inexperienced at dealing with treachery online.

The second way you get spam mail is via webpages you sign up to; a lot of companies share your email with other similar parties to give you deals and offers about items and such things. Personally I find this wrong, if I don’t sign up to a website I really don’t want spam coming from them with bogus offers. Managing your junk folder is a big help in getting rid of potentially dangerous spam.

All in all phishing and spam are just sneaky ways of deceiving you into thinking they have something you want or need.