Posts Tagged ‘Spam’
The Byron Review “Safer Children in a Digital World” was issued on 27th March 2008. It has generally been well-received as it offers a balanced view which takes account of both the benefits and the dangers of children using the internet. The report makes a number of useful and practical suggestions which could be implemented to minimise the dangers.
However, the report suffers from one glaring omission – it completely fails to mention that a certificated Internet Safety course has been available from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) since 2006 and is widely taught in Scottish schools. It is believed to be the only course of its type developed by a national awarding body in the EU.
The course isn’t restricted to schools – it’s also offered to adults, including parents, teachers and youth workers via evening classes in further education colleges. It has been used for training police cadets by the Strathclyde Police Force and has been delivered to about 4000 pupils in Manchester schools. The course is supported by a complete online package of teaching and assessment materials and a purpose-written textbook entitled “Internet Safety Skills”, published by Leckie and Leckie.
Pop-ups are the annoying ads and other things on the internet that open on your monitor as you’re surfing the web. Their main goal is to either get you to visit a certain website or to collect your name and email address for marketing purposes.
The pop-ups that come on your screen as a web page loads are usually caused by something called JavaScript. This is a simple programming language that can be integrated into the HTML used to build web sites.
Some pop-ups are useful. Sometimes a user clicks a link on the Web page and a small window will open asking a user to fill in information or giving a user more information. Music sites often use pop-ups to play tunes in a specialized player window. This can be a completely legitimate use of pop-ups and is quite different from the pop-up advertisements that appear unbidden.
CAPTCHA a newfound way of creating security where even computers are not able to solve the information. This is to create security, and only humans can solve CAPTCHA, this means the risk is minimized.
The older version of CAPTCHAS that were used were very much not accessible to the bots but new software’s were made in order to recognize it, and then even these CAPTCHAS were accessed through bots. Thus CAPTCHA decoding gained optimum importance. The reason the older CAPTCHAS did not last for long is that it used nothing different but just was written in a font that the bots could not recognize that. This is not the case with the modern (recent) ones. This time around they have been made much more difficult to solve for the bots where the words are fitted in a very messy manner, To add to the difficulties of the bots the words are cut by a passing line (horizontally as well as vertically) making the task even more difficult to the bots.
Another way that has been used to make it more complicated is that the words are written one over the other; also the words are written in different texts, where some are written in capital letters, whereas some are written in smaller alphabets. Some words are written in letters and some are mixed up with words, and many more different ways.
Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging, and often directs users to give details at a particular website. It is one of the biggest threats on the internet and users need to be made more aware of what it is and what it can do. Phishing is so prevalent on the internet that if you receive an email supposedly from your bank, it’s likely to be either a criminal attempt to get your login details or a real email warning you to be careful of this scam.
This scam typically works like this: a scammer sends you an email message making it seem like it is an official message from a company you may have financial or other interests with, like your bank, PayPal, or eBay, and ask for your personal information such as social security number, account number or password. These emails are also becoming more personalized, making them more believable to their victims and has become such a problem on AOL that they added a message on their instant messenger stating: The rapidly growing class of identity theft scams on the internet has caused both short-term and long-term economic damage, faced by millions of people every day. First appearing more than ten years ago, phishing has grown to become the international electronic crime of choice for both amateurs and professionals alike. “no one working at AOL will ask for your password or billing information”. These types of attacks have outnumbered e-mails infected with viruses and trojans. Most methods of phishing use some form of deception designed to make a link in an email appear to belong to a legitimate organization, while in fact it sends you to a bogus website. If you get a suspicious email contains a URL link, don’t click on it, roll your mouse over the link and see if it matches what appears in the email. Learn to recognize spoof emails by checking web addresses and security indicators, such as a locked padlock on the browser frame. As a general rule, never click on emails coming from unknown sources. Spam filters can help by reducing the number of phishing emails that users receive, however spammers often use poor spelling, bad grammar, missing words and logic gaps to get around the filters.
Phishing is the fastest growing crime which everyone on the internet is susceptible to, an old con game taking advantage of new technology. It is so prevalent because it is such a low-cost and low-effort activity. Phishing attacks are likely to grow more sophisticated and our defenses against them must continue to improve to combat them.