The threats of online security: How safe is our data?

Due to the advance of technology and development of e-commerce, online security is a major issue and concern by the customers when make any transaction through online. Therefore, we need to consider about the security for our personal or private data as threats can come in from any direction.

There are few common threats of online security that we need to be aware such as spam mail, viruses, phishing attacks, social engineering, spyware attack and etc.

Spam mail

Spam mails sent without the alert of the recipients. According to survey, security-related threats and attack incident in year 2007, Malaysia, total 38601 emails is spam. Nowadays, the quality of spam has improved. It can be sent out together with attach of images, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets or videos which may links to malicious sites or malware.

virus
Computer virus is a dangerous virus and with the feature of able to generate and copies itself. In addition, it causes changes in the computer settings as well as slows down the performance of the computer. The most damaging viruses are the ones that are simply designed to cause as much destruction as possible, such as deleting important files.

Phishing attacks

A popular method of phishing is to steal consumers' personal identity data and financial account credentials through fake websites. Phishing messages pretend to be from eBay, PayPal and etc. The scams sent out e-mails to recipients by asking them log in to the fake websites in order to disclose their private information such as financial accounts number. If the private information entered, they will steal the username and passwords that you are sunk.

Spyware attack

Spyware is one of the online threats that is designed to steal the information from computer without your authorization. Spyware is dangerous in that it can steal your personal information, such as documents, passwords, credit card numbers, bank accounts numbers, for the sole benefit of the people behind the spyware.

In conclusion, online security should be pay attention by online users since threats will not say “hello” to you when it is come unless there are some prevention action such as using anti-virus programmed. It helps to detect viruses which contain in the file received and scanned it to ensure it is safe before open it.