April
9, 2014: How secure is the Internet?
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Recently
there was a Heartbleed bug that forced shutdown of several web sites as a
precaution or protection of customer data before a fix could be implemented.
How often do we hear a hacking problem publicly? How safe is our activities
over the Internet?
I think:
- Do not trust 100% on the security of encryption technologies, anti-virus, or
firewalls, i.e. having those installed on your devices/computers don't protect
you from malicious hackers completely. These technologies are safe against
someone like me, who do not work in the security field or is not interested in
breaking those.
- Web mails or social web sites: do not store or spread your personal
information/details such as data used to authenticate/validate of your identity
by financial institutions. They may steal your data to access your financial
account(s).
- Do change your passwords from time to time, i.e. randomly.
- Is HTPS secured? It is used for many credit card or banking transactions. Be
careful with those transactions, too. They could hack/eavesdrop, or decrypt
your data sending over the Internet connections while you were doing
transactions.
- Don't store any confidential or sensitive information on your computer,
laptop, tablets, smart phones, or iPhone. Hackers have fewer incentives to
break in your devices.
- Tablets and smart phones are like a simple version of a personal computer. So
be careful that hackers could get in those devices as they had done with a
computer.
- Avoid installing pirate software, freeware, unknown applications on you
computers, tablets, smart phones because it may also install something called
Trojan Horse, which opens a secret channel for hackers to enter your devices.
How about open source software or free applications? How can we locate or
identify developers behind those software codes? Can we understand codes
released/published? Is the compiled version same as the source codes posted?
What if hackers embed flaws/holes in those codes? If you had a critical
application, you should buy anti-virus software, where the company developed
stands by their products and support it.
One thing is important: don't underestimate malicious hackers.
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