Monday, January 19, 2015

Those Great, Not so Secure, Computers We Love!

We love our computers, don’t we? I mean, they have made our everyday life so much easier and being able to play cool games anytime is also a plus! I mean, Star Wars: The Old Republic anybody? So, what am I talking about this blog post? There is a good chance that I just started to ramble on this digital piece of paper with the intent of stealing that precious two kilobytes of bandwidth it took to load this up from you, but that’s not the case….this time.  

Some of you might know that I am pursuing a college degree in Information Systems Security. That is pretty much learning how people can break in to systems, steal and destroy your data. It is scary how easy it is to do! I participated in an online lab for one of my courses that showed me how simple it was. I was able to execute an attack against a port and slip in to the backdoor of a Linux machine and get root privileges! (Pretty much, I controlled that machine). Of course this was a school environment and it was their own computers, so nothing malicious happened, but it was a demonstration that how simply leaving one port open allowed someone to execute an attack that got inside!

Now, I’m not trying to scare you or anything like that. I just wanted to give you food for thought about how insecure computers can be. To leave you with a bit of peace, make sure your windows firewalls are on, you have spyware control on there (I recommend Spybot Search and Destroy) and that you have a virus scanner on there. (I love Norton, but for those of you who are cheap, take a look at AVG Free).
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Just be careful where you go on the internet and make sure you really want to be clicking on that link. You do not want to accidentally let someone in. 

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