The most important subject for someone without any knowledge about security is to understand the fundamentals of it. I hope this will be helpful in gaining such fundamental knowledge.
Understanding computer security also makes you a good citizen by stopping your computer to spread viruses, spam and computer crime to other people and by increasing the cost of crime. Let’s start with the basics.
Viruses and Other Nasties
Prevention is much better than cure. Your objective should be to prevent the attackers from running their program on your computer. But it is worth considering what may happen and what you can do if you lose this battle. The malicious programs you are most likely to notice are the ones that ‘self-propagate – they contain a mechanism that allows them to copy themselves onto other computers. A self-propagating program is called a ‘virus’ if it requires your assistance to propagate, a ‘worm’ if it propagates unassisted using a network, or possibly ‘spyware’ if its purpose is to gather information. Note that these are all just programs, and should be kept off your computer in the normal ways.
Root Kit
The ‘root kit’ is the extreme example because it replaces core programs in your computer’s ‘operating system’, such as Windows or Linux, with look-alikes that try to convince you by every means possible that they are the originals. Thus if you try to check for a rootkit by looking at the files on your disk, the program in your operating system that usually gives you this list of files could be part of the rootkit held in a file on the disk, innocently telling you that there are no rootkit files on the disk. What used to be a truthful answer from the operating system is now a lie from the rootkit.
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Backdoor
A ‘backdoor’ is an alternative means of entry that bypasses the normal restrictions. This might be as simple as a password created by an attacker for later use, but it could be something less obvious such as an adjustment to a program that checks passwords to make it always accept a particular password.
Trojan Horse
A ‘Trojan horse’, named after Greek mythology, is a program used for gaining access to a computer rather than maintaining access. Like a rootkit, a Trojanhorse is a program that pretends to be something else. Any program you use could be a Trojan horse without you noticing, so consider where you obtain your programs from as well as what they appear to do when you run them.
Anti-Virus
To help detect and remove the malicious programs you can use ‘anti-virus’ software. Their primary method of detecting a virus is to look for a small piece of the virus, called a ‘signature’, that the anti-virus company has
decided by manual inspection of a captured virus is unique to that virus. You should configure your anti-virus program to obtain daily updates of its signatures from the internet. An anti-virus program may also be able to remove a virus from your computer.
This relies on the anti-virus company fully understanding the virus, which is not always an easy task. Viruses are intentionally written to be difficult to understand and remove. After an attacker has run a program on your computer you will probably have to completely format and reload the computer to be certain it is clean.
Click here to read part 2 of this post.
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