Not Computer Secure - What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Computers - A part of our lives

Today computers are essential to our everyday work. From a business point of view it is being able to centrally share files, access databases, use of the web and many other uses that would help us do our work effectively no matter where we are located. From a personal and social side of things, it is being able to connect to the internet and communicate with family and friends using social sites such as Facebook, the ability to shop online or visit the online bank, or write a formal letter using applications such as Microsoft Office, and the list would go on with endless abilities.

The evolution of the computer system

Computer and the Internet have evolved rapidly over the past 15 years. Today you can purchase a hard drive with disk space of a Terabyte and above. That’s a 1024 GB of hard drive space! There are all the other components of a computer that have come a massively long way such as RAM memory, Video cards, etc.

It’s a good job these components have evolved so quickly because operating systems such as Windows 7, and technologies and services such as Web applications, SAAS and cloud computing has developed rapidly as well; and the need to run these technologies, operating systems and software applications on more powerful computers systems.

The dangers that come with

Now most businesses run over the internet or take part in some kind of ecommerce. You can order a bike online from Halfords, or purchase a box of washing powder and some brillo pads from Tesco’s website. So as computers developed, became more powerful and businesses started to move over the web, unfortunately so did hackers and online criminals.

Businesses use computer systems and the internet to make money, and criminals use this same concept to stealing money. There are now organised online hackers and criminals through out the world. The days have gone when hacker just wanted to make a name and see their work published all over the media. Now there are other motivations behind the work, the biggest one which is to make money.

Not keeping up to date and secure can result in both small and huge problems, such as viruses and worms that will slow your system down, or alter it in such a way which would affect usability of the system.

The more serious issues are where these viruses and worms spread through out your home or work network, and have such an affect on your computer/s, that it makes them completely un-usable. For a company, this can take months to rebuild and cost thousands or even millions.

Then there’s the other side to viruses and malicious threats where crimes take place such as installing key loggers and back doors. These are usually attempts to stealing personal data such as credit card information, passwords, personal health details, etc.

From a business perspective this could be an attempt to stealing intellectual property, or other confidential information that would expose one company’s strategy to the other. This could have detrimental affects on a company’s reputation and loss of business.

The scary part to all this is hacking tools are very easy to get hold of. For example there are tools out there that would attempt to break passwords. These tools would attempt dictionary attacks and brute force attacks. This means the tool or software would attempt every word in the dictionary to attempt to match a password. Brute force means it will attempt to exhaust all letters in the alphabet until a password is broken. This is why you may often hear not to use simple passwords, and try and mix these with special characters and numbers. Also to try and use long passwords as brute force attacks are much more difficult on long passwords.

So it is essential to keeping your computer and network safe from malicious threats. The obvious basics are to have a good anti virus scanner and firewall installed. Then there’s the other parts such as keeping windows and applications up to date with latest security fixes, ensuring you make use of strong wireless security, using long and complicated passwords, encrypting your important data, having a good data leakage protection strategy, and many other things you need to consider to keep your computer and its data secure.

Visit Jafer's website for more info on anti virus and firewall recommendations and general computer security tutorials.