Why Surfing the Internet Without Protection Should Be a Criminal Offence
As with the human HIV virus, I don't think it will be long before having unprotected surfing of the Internet and catching a virus you can spread to other people will be as big a no-no as having unprotected sex.
Quite frankly, I would welcome some countries making it a criminal offence to connect to the Internet without an automatically daily updated antivirus program installed on the user's computer.
I recently wrote an article entitled "5 Reasons To Check Your Website Security and 10 Website Security Checks You Should Do On Your Site.
" But of equal concern should be the security of the computer you use to connect to the Internet and your website, or any site.
There is no doubt about it hacking into websites, the downloading of malware by unprotected and unsuspecting Internet users and the infection of computers with all types of viruses is on the increase every year.
In 2008 over 7,000 variants of adware and 30 million computers were reported to be infected by fake antivirus programs estimated to be earning their creators $10 million dollars per month.
* By 2009 there were 40 million malware variants increasing at a rate of 55,000 new ones per day *.
And the number of ways users can be infected is also increasing and includes browsing web pages, frequenting social networks like Twitter and Facebook, downloading files from peer-to-peer (music & movie) file sharing networks, responding to e-greetings; fake news stories and phishing emails where users are often conned or infected without realizing.
In 2008 email accounted for almost 80% of virus infections *.
Files from FTP sites can harbor viruses or other threats which could then be downloaded into your computer.
Online news groups and chat rooms are sometimes infected by posted messages that contain a virus.
Viruses normally infect executable files with.
exe or.
com extensions, but they also infect web pages (.
html, php and others), Word documents (.
doc), spreadsheets (.
xls), and even image files (jpg, gif).
The wide scale use of the online Internet and more technologies to share data in the offline world through USB drives and other removable drive media means that infections can take place in far greater numbers and far quicker than ever before.
Around 11% of computers around the world are part of botnets responsible for 85% of all spam sent.
This means someone can be using your computer to send SPAM emails and you don't even know it.
In addition around half a million computers are infected daily by bots *.
Bots are programs that reside on a computer unknown to the user awaiting commands from their creator or controller.
The computer is then used unknown to its owner to infect other computers and join all infected computers together to create botnets.
Botnet controllers often rent out their network to be used for downloading malware onto infected computers or causing distributed denial of services (DDOS) attacks on websites.
A DDOS is where 10's or 100's of thousands of infected computers are directed to request web pages from a website at the same time.
This effectively blocks the website responding to page requests from real visitors to the site.
The site then becomes inaccessible to real users.
In 2010 there was a rise of malware, phishing and viruses targeting the new band of users accessing the Internet using mobile phones and iPhones, a trend that is expected to accelerate in 2011.
It may not be long before using a computer without an up to date antivirus program automatically kept up to date with daily new virus threats becomes a criminal offence in some countries.
Just as with the spread of the human HIV virus you know you shouldn't have unprotected sex.
Well surfing the Internet can get you many other types of viruses and infections unless you protect yourself.
So, practice SAFE SEX and SAFE SURF, get protected! And while using free antivirus software that's out of date or comes without daily threat updates is perhaps better than no protection at all, it's still as risky as having sex with an out of date condom that probably has small holes in it.
There really is no excuse for not buying a good antivirus program, there are many to choose from especially for the home computer user that are under $25.
So do us all a favour get yourself some proper protection.
Quite frankly, I would welcome some countries making it a criminal offence to connect to the Internet without an automatically daily updated antivirus program installed on the user's computer.
I recently wrote an article entitled "5 Reasons To Check Your Website Security and 10 Website Security Checks You Should Do On Your Site.
" But of equal concern should be the security of the computer you use to connect to the Internet and your website, or any site.
There is no doubt about it hacking into websites, the downloading of malware by unprotected and unsuspecting Internet users and the infection of computers with all types of viruses is on the increase every year.
In 2008 over 7,000 variants of adware and 30 million computers were reported to be infected by fake antivirus programs estimated to be earning their creators $10 million dollars per month.
* By 2009 there were 40 million malware variants increasing at a rate of 55,000 new ones per day *.
And the number of ways users can be infected is also increasing and includes browsing web pages, frequenting social networks like Twitter and Facebook, downloading files from peer-to-peer (music & movie) file sharing networks, responding to e-greetings; fake news stories and phishing emails where users are often conned or infected without realizing.
In 2008 email accounted for almost 80% of virus infections *.
Files from FTP sites can harbor viruses or other threats which could then be downloaded into your computer.
Online news groups and chat rooms are sometimes infected by posted messages that contain a virus.
Viruses normally infect executable files with.
exe or.
com extensions, but they also infect web pages (.
html, php and others), Word documents (.
doc), spreadsheets (.
xls), and even image files (jpg, gif).
The wide scale use of the online Internet and more technologies to share data in the offline world through USB drives and other removable drive media means that infections can take place in far greater numbers and far quicker than ever before.
Around 11% of computers around the world are part of botnets responsible for 85% of all spam sent.
This means someone can be using your computer to send SPAM emails and you don't even know it.
In addition around half a million computers are infected daily by bots *.
Bots are programs that reside on a computer unknown to the user awaiting commands from their creator or controller.
The computer is then used unknown to its owner to infect other computers and join all infected computers together to create botnets.
Botnet controllers often rent out their network to be used for downloading malware onto infected computers or causing distributed denial of services (DDOS) attacks on websites.
A DDOS is where 10's or 100's of thousands of infected computers are directed to request web pages from a website at the same time.
This effectively blocks the website responding to page requests from real visitors to the site.
The site then becomes inaccessible to real users.
In 2010 there was a rise of malware, phishing and viruses targeting the new band of users accessing the Internet using mobile phones and iPhones, a trend that is expected to accelerate in 2011.
It may not be long before using a computer without an up to date antivirus program automatically kept up to date with daily new virus threats becomes a criminal offence in some countries.
Just as with the spread of the human HIV virus you know you shouldn't have unprotected sex.
Well surfing the Internet can get you many other types of viruses and infections unless you protect yourself.
So, practice SAFE SEX and SAFE SURF, get protected! And while using free antivirus software that's out of date or comes without daily threat updates is perhaps better than no protection at all, it's still as risky as having sex with an out of date condom that probably has small holes in it.
There really is no excuse for not buying a good antivirus program, there are many to choose from especially for the home computer user that are under $25.
So do us all a favour get yourself some proper protection.
Source...