10-11-2012, 01:01 PM
INTERNET SECURITY REPORT
internetsecurity.doc (Size: 25 KB / Downloads: 19)
INTRODUCTION
If there was ever a need to give your desktop security a boost, it is now Take, for example, the e-mail worms Despite all sorts of network protection, they still manage to get inside and do their deeds Navidadexe, kakhta,loveletter etc the list is endless When the desktops themselves are not secure, then the security of their communication channels also becomes questionable How do we know that our e-mail is not being captured and read elsewhere? It may be fine if our mail is any regular mail, but what if it contains the details of a critical project ,or your financial data? Web browser security, too, has been an issue for sometimes There is a plethora of websites that can run malicious script on out machine the moment we click on a link Then, ofcourse, the safety of desktop hardware itself is becoming an issue A computer is made up so many small parts that anyone can easily put one in the pocket and walk off Notebooks are even easier to swipe as they are light and east to carryIn the pages that follow we analyze most of these issues and talk about how we can secure our desktop and communication
The Internet is happening and everybody is riding the wave
Everybody includes everyone from completely novice users to experts If you fall in the second category, you may not have much to worry about However, if you are amongst the novice users surfing the web for a good time of official work, then we may have something to think about How do we know that while we are surfing, somebody on the internet isn't actually accessing our system and doing all sorts of things to it? This can be anything from stealing important files, to deleting crucial documents, of if somebody is really malicious, corrupting the applications on our system, thus leaving them useless The recent onslaught of e-mail worms is the finest example when it comes to security threats, our desktop is actually like a sponge Given this situation, we cannot ever feel 100 percent safe, that’s why it's time to understand where the security gaps exist on our desktop and how to go about plugging them
THREATS FROM THE BROWSER:
Security web site was well designed and contained interesting links on how to protect our desktop from attacks, etc We clicked on one such link and that it was trap System went haywire, e-mail client automatically opened and started opening mail, applications started opening on their own etc All this happened with in a matter of a few seconds The web browser is an easy way for somebody to get into our system Most web browsers have configurable security settings So if we have a frilling that somebody is using our web browser to access our system, then push up the security settings of our web browser Set it to prompt we whenever a script request to be executed the number of scripts used by most web sites today This way, we can control the scripts we like to run on our systems
THREATS FROM E-MAIL:
Spanning and mail bombing are old hat Through they can still happen and cause problems, they happen upfront , so we can take preventive measures against them We can setup filters to delete mail off the server without downloading it, or use IMAP4 instead of POP3 for down loading our e-mail, which down loads just our mail headers and not the entire message, check with our e-mail headers and not the entire message, check with our e-mail administrator for IMAP support on our mail server It's quicker and since we can see all mail that's coming to our account, we can delete the unsolicited ones
However, what if we get an e-mail with an attachment from somebody we know? It can be invitation to a party from a friend of a mail from your boss asking we to check out a file It's a tough situation If it's actually sent by them, and we don't open it we might get into trouble with them later If it went from their mailbox unknowingly then the attached worm would wriggle through our desktop taking its toll So what should we do? Almost everybody recommends using a good anti-virus package with the latest update
The first thing to do is to check the date of the e-mail we received with the attachment Some worms use our address book and randomly pick an old message from our inbox and send it out to others So if it's a predated message then it's likely to be a worm You can confirm this by looking at the extension of the attachment If it's an odd looking at the extension we have never seen of an EXE then it's likely to be a virus KAKhta and navidadexe are the most recent examples If it's some sort of documents, then check whether the sender is reachable over phone and simply call up to find out In fact, that's the most convenient way to protect our desktop