Internet Security, Risks Internet Security Presents Field Essay

Internet Security, risks internet security presents field information technology implementing solutions address challenges. The paper 15 pages length ( including title reference page). 1. Title Page: Include, paper title, title, instructor's, date.

Internet security

In today's advanced technological world, online users are faced with a myriad of problems and risks. Any online user is vulnerable to Trojans, viruses, worms, spyware, and malware. The user is exposed to sniffers, spoofing software, and phishing. There are many tools that are employed online that breach a user's privacy without their knowledge Dinev & Hart, 2005.

Web tracking software is used by malicious companies to access a person's online behavior and information, which the company will sell to other marketing companies. Corporations and government institutions are constantly been hacked for their information. Banks have lost millions as the hackers access customer accounts and withdraw funds illegally Dinev & Hart, 2005.

The reasons for these attacks could be system weaknesses, or user carelessness. A user who is not careful when browsing online could divulge information that can be used by a hacker to access sensitive information online.

Introduction

The way people live today has been revolutionized by the internet. Majority of activities like financial services, socializing, information access, entertainment, and product purchase all take place online. People are now relying on the internet for these activities and more due to its pervasive information collection and wide coverage. With continuous and frequent use people have come to trust the internet as a gateway to home, personal, and office convenience Dinev & Hart, 2005.

The internet is vulnerable to many risks due to its simple nature based on host servers and a host of backbones. The hosts will vary from personal computers to supercomputers that make use of different software and hardware. The main linkage in all these hosts is the Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). This is the protocol used for all communications on the internet Hansen, 2001.

It is based on the functionality that if a host has the TCP/IP it can access other computers that are using the same operating system and backbone. TCP/IP is an open technology, which exposes the internet to numerous pitfall and security risks.

Internet Protocol (IP) does not perform any authentication of data packets, which makes it vulnerable to attacks by malicious users. Without an authentication mechanism, IP's cannot determine the authenticity of the data packets submitted Dinev & Hart, 2005.

This makes it difficult to determine the originality of a data packet. Therefore, a data packet can claim it is from a specific address, but there is no way this can be determined to be correct. It is easy for a user to enter into a host and make changes to the content in the system. There been no check for criminal activities, crime on the internet and security breaches have continued to increase as the internet evolves. The internet has continued to grow spreading to all levels of human activities and business activity. When a price is attached to an internet breach, security issues become significantly noticeable Kannan, Rees, & Sridhar, 2007.

There are companies that have filed for bankruptcy, personal information released to public domains, business have lost money through espionage, and national databases hacked. These are some of the issues that have arisen due to internet security breaches Cavusoglu, Mishra, & Raghunathan, 2004.

Internet security continues to evolve as the internet continues to become more complex. Malicious people have become intelligent, can anticipate, and undermine the internet security measure been undertaken. This is why a majority of companies are today considering internet security to be part of their risk management strategy in order to avoid business and financial loss Straub & Welke, 1998.

Individuals using the internet have been forced to spend a lot of money on software that will prevent any theft of their information online. Even with all these measure in place quite often we hear of an internet security breach that results in losses worth millions of dollars Dinev & Hart, 2005()

The purpose of this paper is identifying the various types of internet security issues that are faced by businesses, consumers, individuals, and governments. The paper will attempt to provide solutions to the issues identified, and devise measures that can be used to ensure a safe internet environment. Readers will find information that they can use to understand the various approaches attackers employ to breach internet security. The nature of this paper is technical, which might be difficult for lay users to understand.Persons in the technology field will grasp all the concepts presented and find the information relevant. The paper has focused on the major problems, but there are other prevailing problems that pertain to internet security that have not been discussed.

Different internet security breaches

Anyone who uses the internet is prone to privacy and security risks Miyazaki & Fernandez, 2000.

The risks a person is prone to increase as new technologies are developed and introduced. This is because new technologies mostly have bugs that malicious people can exploit. This makes it difficult for the antivirus software a person uses to keep up with the technologies. It has been established that not all hacker events are reported. This may be due to the negative effect such reporting could have on the individual or company Cavusoglu et al., 2004()

Denial of Service (DoS)

Companies have firewalls that are outdated and their network perimeters focus only on certain security breaches, which does not cover all the internet security aspects. Malicious individuals are always looking out for weaknesses in the corporate security systems Hansen, 2001.

Denial of Service is type of attack that generates malicious traffic, thus denying genuine user requests to the network any service. This attack starts by sending a worm, bug, spyware, or virus to the host computer using spoofed addresses. The host computer will respond to these requests assuming that the requests are genuine, which will in turn result in too many requests been served by the host computer Grazioli & Jarvenpaa, 2003.

Once the program has received a response it will continue to submit requests to others on the network. The network will be slowed down due to the amount of requests that the program will be submitting. In other instances, the network can fail to respond completely, which would deny genuine users access to the network services. The Welchia and Blaster worm are some type of DoS attacks that have resulted in the shut down networks. The worms were able to infect hundreds of private networks as they were able to reproduce themselves. Companies have suffered great losses due to these actions Hansen, 2001()

IP spoofing

IP spoofing is the most basic and common security breach. This breach involves a host claiming to have an IP address that belongs to another host. As different systems are all connected to the internet, there is only one way of identifying each computer system, which is the IP address. Using the IP address, the receiving computers are able to identify and respond to the requests or data packets Juul & Jorgensen, 2003.

The attackers could device a method of spoofing IP addresses and send data packets to the host computer. The data packets would require the host to perform certain actions that might be harmful or malicious. There are applications that will permit IP addresses to login and access the host or server. This would pose a great risk as the attacker could gain access to all the information and traffic that the host computer services Needham, 2003()

Spyware and web trackers

According to Kannan et al. (2007)

, spyware has reached the epidemic level, and it will get worse as time passes. It is estimated that 95% of computers worldwide have been infected with spyware. The tools used for the removal of spyware are not as effective, and they only last a few months. With the release of a new spyware, there is a removal tool developed for removing only this spyware. Web trackers are used to track the browsing habits of users. Web trackers are used for marketing purposes in order to understand the behavior of website users. They can also be used to invade the privacy of individuals as they monitor all the users' activities online Dinev & Hart, 2005.

Web trackers have been devised by online companies for data collection without the user's knowledge. Some of the companies will sell this data to marketing companies who will target the users with their advertisements. These trackers may be harmless, but they have the potential to be abused by malicious individuals. An individual can purport to have a genuine web tracker, which they will use to obtain person information about a person. The information could be used for identity theft or even credit card theft.

There are many pop-up windows that bombard a user when they go online. Some of these pop-up windows contain spyware programs that will self install.....