Safe Internet Blog

People may resent viruses, trojans, and worms, but believe it or not, computer virus, worms, and trojans are really a masterpiece. Not only that they prove that we really are prone to tragedy as mere human, taking into account that a most lethal virus not only was able to destroy internet network with hundreds of millions of dollars loss, and also that as a social community, we are all becoming connected very closely with each other through the internet, confirmed by how rapidly a virus can spread.

January 2007, the Storm worm started to spread. On October, it has reached and infected 50 million computers, according to scientists. Do you know how many computers and in what time in estimation that a worm named MyDoom infected in January 2004? Hundreds of thousands of computers in one day!

If you compare the damage it can cause with the code size and complexity of a worm or virus, those numbers are unbelievable. Computer virus programs are very uncomplicated and particularly small in size, yet they can cause almost indefinite damage.

What are the kinds of computer malicious software or malwares? Well these are the most common ones:

- Email viruses. Spreading through file attachments on emails, this kind of virus replicates itself by sending the same email attachment to every contacts it can find in the address book of the infected computer. Very bad ones can execute upon being previewed in the email client program.

- Worms. A worm software duplicates itself via networks by taking advantage of security defects, finds its way into any computers and multiplies itself until the whole network is infected.

- Viruses. A virus lives and spreads by parasiting to a real usually big program. It infects other programs by injecting copies of itself onto them.

- Trojans. Named according to an epic story about the same approach, a trojan finds its way into its victim’s computer by fooling that it is a common software. Once it’s got there, not only will it behave as it act act as if it does, if any, but it will also do harms or damages to the infected computer and data.

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To get better understanding on how to prevent information theft in guarding computer security, it is best that we have this specific knowledge about cookies. This knowledge may be tiny and of less excitement but we can acquire a huge understanding on how they operate and use it for our protection against security threats.

1. Cookies place in local drives details about your computer and settings. For example, if you have been to a site before, meaningyou are a return user, and this information is stored in cookies. Besides that, it also can store specific informations such as city names that will be used for automatic local weather updates from a site.

2. Internet cookies are made by a web site server to be stored onto a computer at the time the user first visits a site. Later in the session between the user and the webpage, more cookies could be saved or altered.

3. Cookies are written in name-value pairs such as “ZipCode,” and the value is “60119″ for zip code a user last entered in a web page query.

4. Web site’s cookies will not obtain data from a computer. The user may be asked to provide data in a query regarding his / her personal information, but a cookie can’t obtain it alone although the file was in the computer drive.

5. Even though a cookie can store various other data, it can’t retrieve data saved in other cookies.

6. You are allowed to erase the cookies on your computer by going into the Temporary Internet Files folder.

7. In terms of internet cookies, “targeting” is intensely focused marketing to internet users based on information (like past preferences on sold items) found in their cookies.

8. Cookies are also used to track users whereever they are in the internet not just in one site. This technology was developed by DoubleClick company.

9. In 2003, White House Office of Management and Budget forbade the use of persistent cookies, which are cookies that remain active, even after a user has exited out of his or her Web browser. This kind of cookies are easily abused to become spyware and viruses.

10. The small, 1×1 pixel cookies called web bugs stored in banner ads are small 1×1 pixel cookies hidden in banner ads that store cookies onto a machine when a user clicks a banner ad.

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