Internet Vulnerability
Online Predators
The seemingly closed and private cyber space prompts young and immature users to trust anyone and an intimacy develops overtime. Wicked people take advantage of this relationship and exploit the young and children.
How Online Predators work?
Find kids through social networking, blogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, e-mail, discussion boards, and other Web sites.
Pornography and Child Pornography
An obsession to internet pornography leads to many problems. It affects people of different ages in different ways. Children are more susceptible to the traps in internet because of their natural curiosity. Some adults too fall prey to the situation because of unsatisfied personal and work relations.
Threats to children with exposure to online pornography
- Interferes with the normal intellectual development of young children.
- The identity and safety of the child will be at risk
- Change of attitude towards the opposite sex
- Misconceptions about sexual relationships and its effects later on marriage life.
Threats to adults
- Loss of interest in daily activities.
- Compulsive urge to spend hours before internet.
- Misconceptions about sexual acts.
- Loss of ability to maintain a healthy relationship with the opposite sex.
- Hinders career growth.
- Inability to maintain relationships with family and friends.
Online Frauds
Almost everyone would like to make some quick money without much effort. Online frauds find this attitude of the common people as an effective way to make some bugs for themselves. Every day, mail boxes are bombarded with millions of spam mails sent by these frauds offering Lottery Money or seeking help for some beautiful refugee girl who is willing to immigrate to any country.
The older generation internet users are more vulnerable to these scams because they are used to the good old trustworthy postal service, which never misled them in all their entire lives. These kinds of scams can be prevented only by making people more ‘net literate’ about the seemingly innocent traps in the cyber space.
Free Trial Offers
You see an amazing product in the internet and there is a free one month trial offer with it. All you have to pay for is the shipping and handling charge which is negligible compared to the usability of the product. Seems so innocent and good but have you ever tried to take the effort to the read the lengthy terms and conditions? ,
Often buried in very small letters deep beneath the condition statements there are a few clauses that make you agree to pay forever a big sum every month for their product. It will take a good deal of your time and effort to cancel the offer after you lost a good amount of your money.
Wi-Fi Hot spots
There are fake Wi-Fi spots cropping up everywhere like airports, railway stations and shopping malls and it is difficult to tell them from the real ones. Criminals duplicate the real websites and the information you send across the online connection will be passed to their laptops. Credit card information and password details can be passed along like this.
Links
“Click on the link to claim your price “. That is what they advertise and the lucrative offer prompts us to click on the link without thinking much. But the price would be soon coming in the form of a ‘bot’. A bot is a software robot that will get installed on your computer without your authorization when you click a link. Soon your computer will be a link in the chain of thousands of ‘zombies’ that the scammers use to send spam e-email.
Fake Anti Virus Software
These kinds of software are generally called ‘scarewares’. When you visit some websites a pop up window may appear that seems as legitimate antivirus software that declares there is an infection in your computer. You will be prompted to run a scan of your system. Of course the virus will be found and there will be hefty fee to download their antivirus software.
After you download their antivirus; the crooks will come to know your credit card number and of course their antivirus software will be a fake. Thus your computer will be at greater risk than ever and your money will be lost.
How to protect yourself
- Don’t use your personal information like birth date as your password or user ID
- Don’t use easy security question others can be guessed for password recovery option.
- Don’t leave passwords for plain view like notebooks, or on the desktop of your computer.
- Don’t use the same password for multiple sites.
- Do create a strong password which is more than 8 characters long with a mix of capital letters, numbers and signals.
- Do check for the address of the website before you enter your financial information. Often crooks use fake sites with a slightly different domain name to cheat people.
- Do stay away from illegal activities like watching pornography. Watching child pornography will invite swift action from the authorities that may land you in prison.
- Do not install free unknown software in your computer. The software may be useful for all the purpose it was intended but it can be a spyware too. Your personal information and data can be sent to distant servers by this kind of spyware.
- Above all be a responsible netizen. Remember that all the laws which are applicable in the real world are applicable in the cyber space too. There is no real anonymity for your actions in internet.