Internet Security Threats

This paper is going to be on the different security threats on the internet, and the different ways to prevent and protect yourself from them. The different threats that are going to be covered are viruses, trojan horses, hackers, spam, corrupt IP packets, port scanner attacks, DOS(denial of service) attacks, spider attacks, worms and socail attacks. Also, I will cover different security practices and computer software and hardware that can help protect and prevent these different attacks on your computer, or network. Many people use the words virus, trojan, and worm interchangeably when talking about attacks on their computer, but in reality, they are different types of attacks, this paper will define and differentiate between the different types of attacks a computer can become a victim of. A virus is software thats used to infect and damage a computer. The code for the virus is usually imbedded into an existing program so that once the program that has the virus inbedded into is executed, the virus code activates and copies itself, it then attaches the copies of itself to other existing programs that exist on the system. Viruses may be simple pranks that just cause messeges to randomly pop up on the screen, but they can also be very damaging to a computer. Viruses tha damage computers destroy programs and/or data right away when they're activated, or on a certain date. There are some viruses that remain dormant and do its damage once a year. One example of this type of virus is the Michelangelo virus, a virus that usually only attacks MS-DOS systems, but can cause an equal amount of damage to other operating sytems, which only infects computers on Michelangelo's birthday. Computers usually get viruses through downloading and installing programs that already have the virus inbedded into it, or through e-mails that are infected. A trojan horse (also known as a trojan) appears to be a normal program, but when it's run, it performs illicit