Internet Security and Its Enemies

The internet may be the savviest innovation that has ever been created in that it has surely provided comfort and ease in the lives of many. Yet as great of an innovation as this may be, this might actually be a good source for crimes especially for unsuspecting people who just merely want to enjoy the benefits of internet use. That is why it is important to have internet security. Whenever you open the internet, you have to secure it. With the internet security, it protects your computer with its files being accessed by unauthorized people, especially those who have bad intentions such as stealing identities. One of the fundamental ways for you to protect your computer is by using very good passwords that would make it hard for an intruder to identify, backing up your files and using permissions before anyone can access it.

Many businesses now are even more aware of updating and securing their computers as they are aware that many identity thefts are attempting to access their computers via the internet with the knowledge that by having access on those business files and using it in one way or another, they can make huge profits of it. These thieves will always try to find a way how to outwit the company's internet security because of that. That is why companies are more watchful and that whenever there is a need to enhance the system, the first and foremost concern is how to further secure the sensitive data stored.

Unfortunately, some programs are considered to be very helpful in protecting the computer such as Malware, virus, Trojan, Worms, Bots and Spyware. So, internet security authorities should be experts in four major areas concerning these six:

• Malware: it is the common name used to identify a software program that has a malicious intent to either spy, breach or destroy the computer's contents. It is not just limited to infiltrating computers but cell phones, PDA's and other technical devices as well.

• Viruses: they infiltrate the computer maliciously and give the computer user a very hard time. The virus can delete, hide, or make the data stored in the computer inaccessible. It can also make other applications not run anymore.

• Trojan: it is a program that pretends to be helpful when in reality it just seeks to destroy files, steal or change something in the system which could cause major problems to the user.

• Worms: they replicate themselves and swarm through the internet system and could destroy a whole community of computer users, even to the extent of destroying a country's economy.

• Bots: takes over the system and may communicate the computers' contents to others.

All six may be used simultaneously by an internet criminal and continue to develop sophistically. That is why there is now the use of the Antivirus programs, which protect your computers from such malicious attacks. Anti-virus software can freely be downloaded online, but still one should be cautious in downloading software even if it is antivirus ones that may represent themselves to be effective but aren't.

Tina L. Douglas is a skilled writer from California. With numerous experiences in the field of writing for several financial institutions, she is greatly qualified across a variety of economic issues. Her notable pieces of writing involve internet security software.

How to Tell If Your Site Has Been Hacked

How do you know if your site has been hacked? Sometimes you will know because the site has dropped precipitously in the search engine rankings for no apparent reason. Or many of your pages are no longer being indexed by the search engines. Or visitors send you emails complaining that their anti-virus software warns them away from your site. These are not good things to have happen, because by then the damage has been done.

A better approach to to proactively scan your site for hacked pages. What you are looking for are unauthorized links to external sites, because most hackers use those links to boost the search engine rankings of their own sites. That makes most hacked pages easy to find with a few simple search engine queries.

The key is to combine the "site:" command with one or more commonly used hacker ranking terms like "viagra" or "cialis". The "site:" command restricts search engine results to pages from the given domain. For example, the query:

site:about.com

restricts the search to the "about.com" domain. All you need to do is add one or two hacker-targeted keywords to the query, as in:

site:whitehouse.gov viagra

That query will return all indexed pages on the "whitehouse.gov" domain that include the word "viagra". (As I write this, there are in fact two pages on the official White House site that have been hacked in this manner. Oops!)

While "viagra" is the most obvious term to search for, there are other possibilities. Any erectile dysfunction drug is a candidate: "levitra", "cialis", etc. Generic version of the brand names are also popular: "sildenafil", "vardenafil", etc. Really, any kind of high-demand pharmaceutical product is a good candidate, though you can also look for money-making schemes (think "forex" or "online gambling") and other things that a spam catcher would normally isolate in your incoming email.

Of course, you will not actually see these links on the pages in question. Hackers do their best to hide the links from human visitors. But they do not hide them from search engines, because the point is to get the search engines to find those links and count them as "votes" to getting their own "money sites" to rank highly for sought-after, highly commercial and extremely competitive terms. That is why a simple search query exposes hacked pages.

What do you do once you have found a hacked page on one of your sites? It depends on how the links were added to your pages and how your pages are generated. You will find lots of help online on how to get rid of link spam from a website and how to "harden" your site against future attacks.

Just remember to run this check on each of your sites every few days. It is a very quick and simple way to detect potential link spam before it becomes a real problem.

Be sure to check out Eric Giguere's privacy policy plugin, useful for anyone running WordPress. Eric is a co-founder of Synclastic Media and has written extensively about all aspects of Internet marketing, website and blog development, and software programming.