Safe Internet Blog

Someone wants to use the internet to order tickets and want to find out when and who are playing at a local stadium. Once you open the site, you have to first fill in a query. It is an simple one. In fact, the point is how simple it is. Because you are a human, the whole thing should be plain and simple. A different story for a computer, the simple test would be mostly impossible to do.

This question is what we already know as CAPTCHA. The acronym actually stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test. It is there to prevent computer-automated user from getting through. There is another term for that, that is a type of Human Interaction Proof or HIP. By now sure you have been through many CAPTCHA tests on many web sites. CAPTCHAs that are widely used nowadays is a sequence of letters but in image form unrecognizable by machines, and made of scratches, undetectable by OCRs. As a human, you only have to type the correct letters in the sequence into a field. If what you typed match exactly the ones in the distorted picture, you are considered a human and pass the test.

So you might be wondering why is this all necessary, to test if it is a computer or a human? The main problem is prompted as there are many people out there who are trying to fool the system. Exploitation of security holes in online systems are more frequently made and improved by hackers. Although they are probably only a minority of all users on the internet, what they do affects almost all of users and web sites. For example, a free dating service might be massively bombarded with an automated account requests from a script. The requests of new accounts could be in a scenario of romance scam that’s meant to harm millions of people. By implementing CAPTCHA to sort out computer programs, the bad attempts can be vastly reduced.

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1. Is my communication with someone online can’t be seen by others, can I have privacy? Yes you can. You can make use of data encryption by sharing key only to legitimate end users. In case the data do get to other parties, it will not be of any use since it is encrypted thus making it unreadable.

2. What is a hash? Is it the key? A hash value is a string of characters that represent encrypted data. In other words, it is the encrypted data.

3. What does SSL stand for, what does it mean? SSL is an acronym for Secure Socket Layer. SSL is a type of public key encryption.

4. How can a firewall protect my computer? A firewall monitors and filters out unwanted data packets from an Internet connection.

5. What is a proxy server? Proxy servers stands between computers accessing the internet and the web servers. They relay requests from users to web servers and vice versa, without the servers realizing who is behind them. This creates a privacy for the users in that web servers have no idea that the real user interacting with them are behind the proxy server.

6. What is a botnet? It is an network of what we call zombie computers. A bot or zombie computer is a computer that has transformed into automatic machines or bots that are under the control of a malicious operator.

7. What is DDoS what does it stand for? DDoS is Distributed Denial of Service. It is an attack that uses computers over the internet to send millions of requests to a server with the goal of overwhelming and crashing the server. In a large scale DDoS attack, the whole internet traffic is affected.

8. Define computer virus, what does it do? Usually, a computer virus is a malicious code that resides within a big program. Although not all viruses harm computer, there are ones that are recorded to have caused calamities.

9. What is phishing? Phishing is a method intended to fool ignorant people into giving away classified information like bank account numbers, usernames and passwords and credit card information, by faking a legitimate web site.

10. What does Cracker mean? What’s a Black Hat? We call hackers infiltrating secured systems to cause rogue things acquire certain informations as crackers. A black hat hacker is someone who actively attempts to break into systems or use computer viruses to steal information or achieve other purposes.

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