With the ever-increasing usage of Internet, numerous activities take place in your computer and it can be for either good or bad. These activities vary from identity theft to people who hack into computers and steal private passwords, documents and files. The fact is that everything is online and opens us to these frauds and makes us victims, unless you have taken the necessary steps to protect your computer. In this tutorial, we will discuss how to use Internet in a safe and secure way, and the precautions that we need to take in order to protect ourselves from the open environment of Internet.

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared mainly for those professionals that are within the IT industry and who are IT specialists, System administrators, Security administrators and in the other applicable departments.This tutorial is intended to make the reader comfortable in getting started with Internet Security and its various other functions.

Prerequisites

It is a basic tutorial where the reader can easily understand the concepts explained with a simple knowledge of how a company or an organization deals with its Internet Security.However, it will help if you have some prior exposure of cookies, phishing attacks,spamming, setting up firewalls, antiviruses, etc.

With the usage of Internet, a number of activities take place in your computer which can be for good or bad and varies from identity thefts to people who hack into computers and steal private passwords, documents and files. The fact is that everything is online and opens us to these frauds and makes us victims, unless you have taken the necessary steps to protect your computer.

It is quite strange that till date, a lot of people don’t give much importance to Internet Security. They think that their computers are invisible, but as soon as they start using their computers for anything that involves logging onto the Internet, they are an easy prey, even for a teenaged hacker.

The following image gives you an idea of how things have changed over the years.

Impact from an Internet Breach

The potential losses in this “cloud” are discussed as follows.

Here is a list of some losses that can have a direct impact on you and others −

• Losing Your Data − An Internet breach can swipe away all the data that you have gathered over the years.
• Reputation Loss − Just think your Facebook account or business email have been hacked by a social engineering attack and it sends fake information to your friends, business partners. You will need time to gain back your reputation after such an attack. Or your webpage has been hacked and the hacker puts up an ugly picture on it, so a new customer that is visiting your webpage to get some information will see this picture named “HACKED” and the chances that he will go away without contacting you will be too high.
• Identity Theft − This is a case where your identity is stolen (photo, name surname, address, and credit card details) and can be used for a crime like making false identity documents or anything else.