Hacker's

Discussing viruses, hacking, and worms in class was something that I know about but didn't understand before then. I knew there were three types viruses, worms, and fake emails (spoofing). I heard of spyware thanks to my mom. She had our home computer attacked by spyware downloading a game off of a website.

I never heard of sniffing and the trojan horse one. Although I knew about spoofing I never knew that was the technical term for that. I remember getting a fake email once from someone trying to run a scam on me. Two weeks later after seeing the email it was on the news for scamming a old lady who fell for it.

Hacker

Hackers are looked as as bad people who basically mess with computer in a way that shouldn't be. If I had any type of big company I know that i would for sure want a hacker to be part of my staff. Hackers have a bad label, but they can be very valuable assets to companies. Companies hire hackers in order to see if there are any flaws in the companies system. I think that this is such a great idea. What better way to make sure that no one can hack your computer system and get to important files then to hire the kind of person who you would be trying to keep your important data from. Another type of hacking is also not something that is bad. There is a type of hacking that is just to find out how something works without trying to do anything criminal. This is something that is completely harmless and may only be to educate themselves. I think that hacking and hackers are not given the best image and people need to learn more about who they are and what they can do. They are useful in many ways.

Hackers

Last week, our professor talked about hackers in class. According to Wikipedia, hackers refers to the re-configuring or re-programming of a system to function in ways not facilitated by the owner, administrator, or designer.
Hacker is not only unmoral, sometimes they are illegal. I just read a news about hacker ,witch reports Hacker Max Ray Vision was sentenced to a prison term of 13 years and ordered to pay restitution of $27.5 million bucks for stealing credit card numbers and selling them.
The word "Hacker" remind me one movie called the Martix.

Internet Piracy

It makes me quite nervous to realize that most of our personal, financial and social information is stored in some database somewhere. What makes me more nervous is that there are people that can hack into these databases and access all of your personal information from the safety of their own home. You can google pretty much anybody's name these days and find out where they live and information about them. The convenience of the Internet definitely comes with some vulnerability issues with the storage and access of personal information.

Every time somebody finds a way to hack into someone's information, there is a team of people who are in control of the security of this information that add a provision to their system to avoid that same hack. This just gives hackers another challenge to overcome and often allows room for another hack to be successful. Since the internet is just code written by people, I feel that there is always away to rewrite the code. I mean let's face it, has internet piracy gone away? No. How long has it been a problem? A very long time. So will it ever end? Or will criminals just keep getting smarter and smarter?

One method to eliminate the stealing of personal information over the internet is to hire the people that stole it in the first place. The government is hiring hackers to work for them to help expose flaws in their systems and help to stop people from being able to access information. Read all about it in this article:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/21/cybersecurity-students-hackers-technology-security-cybersecurity.html

This scares me even more. Hacking has become such a big problem that the only way we can stop it is to ask the hackers for their help? Come on now. If I were you, I would stick to shopping in stores and keeping your information as private as humanly possible before you're the one getting hacked.

Hackers, viruses, ect.

This week in class we learned about hackers, viruses and, spyware. Which can be really scary these days when you think about it. Most people use put their personal information online when they are submitting information about themselves. Something like that happened to my sister when a hacker found out all her personal information and got here checking account numbers and used that to purchase things. Which was actually really scary, and it made me think what would happen if that would have happened to me.
I know that there is software out there that will protect you from all the dangers out there, but that didn't even help the hacker was able to get around her firewall and into the system. So how safe are we really when we purchase Norton or McAfee? I think these programs are really good when it comes reducing the chances of getting viruses, hackers, and spyware, but I have had spyware on my computer and I had full protection on my computer. My software was up to date and it couldn’t even remove the virus.

A good way to prevent all of this from happening is to avoid opening emails that you might think are not trusted. Anything spam related never open it even if you see something that comes from someone that you have in your address book. Avoid downloading from shareware which is where a lot of viruses are floating around. I had to stop downloading from shareware websites because they were loaded with viruses. These are just a couple of techniques that you can do to avoid having problems with hackers, viruses, etc.