Lyfespace

Spamming<=> Spam is any form of unsolicited message, be it email, private forum message or even Tweet. Those behind spam know that the response rate to their rubbish will be incredibly low. They continue, however, because they can send many thousands of spam messages out every hour of the day at next to no cost. Therefore, even an incredibly tiny response rate can lead to huge profits for the spammers. Spam messages don’t usually pose any threat to your security but can be incredibly annoying and distracting. It is, however, possible for more savvy spammer to hide other unwelcome items within their spam messages, such as viruses, worms, spyware and other malware.

Stay Safe <=> - Ensure that you are always running a fully updated anti-virus program - Make sure that you have a firewall and that it is fully operational - Choose secure and hard to guess passwords and change them on a regular basis - Install updates and patches for your operating system as soon as they become available - Never click on links in emails unless you are 100% certain that they are trustworthy - Lastly, engage your brain and employ commonsense – it really is the best security measure!

Phishing<=> In some respects, phishing is a confidence trick, designed by would-be thieves in order to part unsuspecting computer users from their most precious personal and/or financial information. Traditionally, phishing attempts looked to acquire data such as bank account details, social security numbers, and credit card numbers, either for direct financial gain or to facilitate identity theft. - Over the last few years, however, other forms of data and information have become valuable too. - Phishing attempts are now just as likely to target users of social networking sites in order to try and steal their accounts either to use them as a launchpad for socially engineered scams or as a means of spamming the victim’s friends and other contacts. - Phishing scams usually arrive via email and are designed to appear to be from legitimate organisations so as to trick the recipient into responding with their personal information. - Many will even spoof email headers so that they appear to have come from a trusted source, or link to fake websites that are clones of the official sites that they purport to be.

Worms<=> A worm is a self-replicating program which will attempt to spread itself around your network, either via routers, the internet or by email. Unlike a virus, a worm does not need to attach itself to another program in order to spread. While a virus has to attach itself to an existing program, a worm does not – it can replicate and spread on its own. Worms too can cause disruption to computer systems because of the excessive amount of bandwidth that they sometimes use.

SpyWare<=> Spyware can prove to be a major annoyance as it’s goal is usually to collect personal information and browsing habits in order to deliver targeted advertising to you as you browse the web, Spyware is software and, like a virus, is often deceptively added to the user’s machine. In addition to increasing the amount of advertising you are likely to see, or affecting the type of adverts served to you, it can also impact upon the performance of your computer by hogging resources.

Viruses <=> Computer viruses are programs which are designed in order to gain entry onto unsuspecting users’ computers. Once they have gained a foothold within a computer system they will then attempt to duplicate themselves before spreading via email, networks and/or removable storage devices. Typically, their remit is to corrupt or destroy data or otherwise damage the operation of the machine on which they reside.Viruses can be acquired in many ways but some of the more popular ones are through email, peer-to-peer downloading, internet messaging services and downloading infected files found on the internet.

Trojan horse <=> by downloading an application they thought was legitimate but was in fact malicious. Once inside your computer, a Trojan horse can do anything from record your passwords by logging keystrokes (known as a keystroke logger) to hijacking your webcam to watch and record your every move.

computer virus <=> small piece of software that can spread from one infected computer to another. The virus could corrupt, steal, or delete data on your computer—even erasing everything on your hard drive. A virus could also use other programs like your email program to spread itself to other computers.