Investigate the following terms using Google, Wikipedia, or Webopedia. Do all 10

Question

Investigate the following terms using Google, Wikipedia, or Webopedia. Do all 10. Paste a summary with reference of each term in a Word document. Annotate which of the three tools above (Google, Wikipedia or Webopedia) you used. Overall, how would you rank the three tools to complete this exercise? State why. Extra credit: do two more terms of your choosing.

Terms to investigate:

Phishing
Choosing a secure password
Identity theft
Computer virus protection
Internet Scams
Hacker attacks
Firewalls
On-line privacy
Software piracy
Spyware

Explanation / Answer

Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

Choosing a secure password ; As insecure as passwords generally are, they're not going away anytime soon. Every year you have more and more passwords to deal with, and every year they get easier and easier to break. You need a strategy.

The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to explain how they're broken. The general attack model is what's known as an offline password-guessing attack. In this scenario, the attacker gets a file of encrypted passwords from somewhere people want to authenticate to. His goal is to turn that encrypted file into unencrypted passwords he can use to authenticate himself. He does this by guessing passwords, and then seeing if they're correct. He can try guesses as fast as his computer will process them -- and he can parallelize the attack -- and gets immediate confirmation if he guesses correctly. Yes, there are ways to foil this attack, and that's why we can still have four-digit PINs on ATM cards, but it's the correct model for breaking passwords.

Identity theft is a form of stealing someone's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, usually as a method to gain access to resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name.[1][2] The victim of identity theft (here meaning the person whose identity has been assumed by the identity thief) can suffer adverse consequences if they are held responsible for the perpetrator's actions. Identity theft occurs when someone uses another's personally identifying information, like their name, identifying number, or credit card number, without their permission, to commit fraud or other crimes.

Virus protection software is designed to prevent viruses, worms and Trojan horses from getting onto a computer as well as remove any malicious software code that has already infected a computer.

Internet Scam is a general way to define the different types of fraud that consumers face when using the Internet.

The term hacker is used in popular media to describe someone who attempts to break into computer systems. Typically, this kind of hacker would be a proficient programmer or engineer with sufficient technical knowledge to understand the weak points in a security system.

In computing, a firewall is a software or hardware-based network security system that controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic based on applied rule set. A firewall establishes a barrier between a trusted, secure internal network and another network (e.g., the Internet) that is not assumed to be secure and trusted

Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of computer privacy. Privacy concerns have been articulated from the beginnings of large scale computer sharing

Software piracy unauthorized copying of software. Most retail programs are licensed for use at just one computer site or for use by only one user at any time. By buying the software, you become a licensed user rather than an owner (see EULA). You are allowed to make copies of the program for backuppurposes, but it is against the law to give copies to friends and colleagues.

Software piracy is all but impossible to stop, although software companies are launching more and more lawsuits against major infractors. Originally, software companies tried to stop software piracy by copy-protectingtheir software. This strategy failed, however, because it was inconvenient for users and was not 100 percent foolproof. Most software now requires some sort of registration, which may discourage would-be pirates, but doesn't really stop software piracy.

Some common types of software piracy include counterfeit software, OEM unbundling, softlifting, hard disk loading, corporate software piracy, and Internet software piracy.

Spyware is software that aids in gathering information about a person or organization without their knowledge and that may send such information to another entity without the consumer's consent, or that asserts control over a computer without the consumer's knowledge

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