Thursday, June 7, 2007

Privacy and Computer Security Ethics

(For full text with comments please click on the title)

It is extremely important for people on computers to protect their computer from data loss, misuse, and abuse. For example, it is crucial for businesses to keep information they have secure so that hackers can’t access the information. A computer security risk is any action that could cause lost of information, software, data, processing incompatibilities, or cause damage to computer hardware, a lot of these are planned to do damage. An intentional breach in computer security is known as a computer crime which is slightly different from a cybercrime.

A hacker is defined as someone who accesses a computer or computer network unlawfully. The term cracker has never been associated with something positive this refers to someone how intentionally access a computer or computer network for evil reasons. Both crackers and hackers are very advanced with network skills. A cyberterrorist is someone who uses a computer network or the internet to destroy computers for political reasons.

An unethical employee is an employee that illegally accesses their company’s network for numerous reasons. A corporate spy has extremely high computer and network skills and is hired to break into a specific computer or computer network to steal or delete data and information. Shady companies hire these type people in a practice known as corporate espionage. Business and home users must do their best to protect or safeguard their computers from security risks. The next part of this article will give some pointers to help protect your computer.

When you transfer information over a network it has a high security risk compared to information transmitted in a business network because the administrators usually take some extreme measures to help protect against security risks. If your not sure if your computer is vulnerable to a computer risk than you can always use some-type of online security service which is a website that checks your computer for email and Internet vulnerabilities. The typical network attacks that puts computers at risk includes viruses, worms, spoofing, Trojan horses, and denial of service attacks.

Every unprotected computer is vulnerable to a computer virus which is a potentially harming computer program that infects a computer negatively and altering the way the computer operates without the user’s consent. Once the virus is in the computer it can spread throughout infecting other files and potentially damaging the operating system itself. A computer worm is a program that repeatedly copies itself and is very similar to a computer virus. Computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses are all classifies as malicious-logic programs which are just programs that deliberately harms a computer.
You know when a computer is infected by a virus, worm, or Trojan horse if one or more of these acts happen:

Files get corrupted
Programs are files don’t work properly
Unknown files or programs randomly appear
System properties fluctuate

Computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses deliver their payload or instructions through four common ways. Second, is when an individual runs an infected program. Third, is when an individual bots a computer with an infected drive, so that’s why it’s important to not leave media files in your computer when you shut it down. Fourth is when it connects an unprotected computer to a network. Today, a very common way that people get a computer virus, worm, or Trojan horse is when they open up an infected file through an email attachment. There is no known method for completely protecting a computer or computer network from computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, but people can take several precautions to significantly reduce their chances of being infected by one of those malicious programs. When the computer starts up it tries to execute a boot sector on the drives and even if it’s unsuccessful any given various on the boot sector can infect the computer’s hard disk.

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