It’s a dangerous world out there in the World Wide Web. Just as your
mother may have told you to never talk to strangers, the same advice
holds true for the virtual world. You may know to be wary of giving
strangers your business bank account details. But can you be sure the
website you’re logging into is that of your bank and not a forgery
created by a cybercriminal?Cybercriminals
use many different methods to lure you into parting with your
confidential personal or business information. As a small company doing
business on the web, you need to be aware of these methods so you can be
extra vigilant when online.
Here’s a quick explanation of some of the common security threats you may come across:
Malware: Malware is short for “malicious software.” Wikipedia describes malware
as a term used to mean a “variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or
annoying software or program code.” Malware could be computer viruses,
worms, Trojan horses, dishonest spyware, and malicious rootkits—all of
which are defined below.
Computer virus: A computer virus is a 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.
Rogue security software: Have you ever seen a pop-up
window that advertises a security update or alert? It appears
legitimate and asks you to click on a link to install the “update” or
“remove” unwanted malicious software that it has apparently detected.
This could be rogue security software designed to lure people into
clicking and downloading malicious software. Microsoft has a useful webpage that describes rogue security software and how you can protect yourself.
Trojan horse: Users can infect their computers with
Trojan horse software simply 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.
In February 2010, a Guardian Analytics and Ponemon Institute study
of 500 small businesses in the U.S. found that 55 percent of
respondents experienced a fraud attack in the last 12 months. The study
reports that “…[w]ell-funded cyber criminals executed a full-scale
assault on authentication, leveraging widespread infection of end-user
computers with banking Trojans to sneak into online banking accounts
completely undetected.”
Malicious spyware: Malicious spyware is used to
describe the Trojan application that was created by cybercriminals to
spy on their victims. An example would be keylogger software that
records a victim’s every keystroke on his or her keyboard. The recorded
information is periodically sent back to the originating cybercriminal
over the Internet. Keylogging software is widely available and is
marketed to parents or businesses that want to monitor their kids’ or
employees’ Internet usage.
Computer worm: A computer worm is a software program
that can copy itself from one computer to another, without human
interaction. Worms can replicate in great volume and with great speed.
For example, a worm can send copies of itself to every contact in your
email address book and then send itself to all the contacts in your
contacts’ address books.
Because of their speed of infection, worms often gain notoriety
overnight infecting computers across the globe as quickly as victims
around the world switch them on and open their email. This happened with
the Conficker worm (also known as Downadup), which, in just four days, had more than tripled the number of computers it infected to 8.9 million.
Botnet: A botnet
is a group of computers connected to the Internet that have been
compromised by a hacker using a computer virus or Trojan horse. An
individual computer in the group is known as a “zombie“ computer.
The botnet is under the command of a “bot herder” or a “bot master,”
usually to perform nefarious activities. This could include distributing
spam to the email contact addresses on each zombie computer, for
example. If the botnet is sufficiently big in number, it could be used
to access a targeted website simultaneously in what’s known as a
denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The goal of a DoS attack is to bring
down a web server by overloading it with access requests. Popular
websites such as Google and Twitter have been victims of DoS attacks.
Spam: Spam in the security context is primarily used to describe email spam
—unwanted messages in your email inbox. Spam, or electronic junk mail,
is a nuisance as it can clutter your mailbox as well as potentially take
up space on your mail server. Unwanted junk mail advertising items you
don’t care for is harmless, relatively speaking. However, spam messages
can contain links that when clicked on could go to a website that
installs malicious software onto your computer.
Phishing: Phishing scams are fraudulent attempts by
cyber criminals to obtain private information. Phishing scams often
appear in the guise of email messages designed to appear as though they
are from legitimate sources. For example, the message would try to lure
you into giving your personal information by pretending that your bank
or email service provider is updating its website and that you must
click on the link in the email to verify your account information and
password details.
Rootkit: According to TechTarget, a rootkit is a
collection of tools that are used to obtain administrator-level access
to a computer or a network of computers. A rootkit could be installed on
your computer by a cybercriminal exploiting a vulnerability or security
hole in a legitimate application on your PC and may contain spyware
that monitors and records keystrokes.
Rootkits gained notoriety when, in 2005, a security blogger
discovered that a copy-protection tool inside music CDs from Sony BMG
Music Entertainment was secretly installing a rootkit when users copied
the CD onto their computers. At the time, security expert Bruce Schneier warned that the rootkit could allow a hacker to “gain and maintain access to your system and you wouldn’t know it.”
