I don’t know how to start when I want to write this posting. There are so many things to cover and it is as broad as the ICT itself. However, it is very important and needs to be explained.
All of us know that ICT has been a revolution but most probably unaware of its inherent weaknesses/vulnerabilities/etc. Well, nothing is perfect, isn’t? And, those naïve netizens are the usual cyber victims due to technology imperfection/flaw.
As a result, the bad guys aka cyber predators are always on the hunt and always one step ahead. Some cyber incidences are quite straightforward (social engineering e.g. through facebook) and some aren’t (developing malicious software for attack).
Please read this link to get some info on malware infections. http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/457/Monthly_Malware_Statistics_April_2011
How to know if you are infected - take note of the computer virus symptoms:
- Bad sectors
- Unusable files
- Disk volume changes
- File size changes
- New files created
- Some system applications are unavailable
- Antivirus is not working
- Computer is behaving weirdly or rebooting/crash
- And above all, it becomes very3 slow…
So, how do the netizens defend themselves? The least that they can do is by installing antivirus software and update it regularly.
On the contrary, the general netizens don’t even know what an antivirus really does let alone what is a virus. What is malware…trojan, worm, malicious code and rootkit? This is so technical and we don’t have any other choice accept to install the antivirus (host ids can be another option).
Some may be curious and they will passionately do an analysis/experiment on the malware. It is not expensive though to conduct this static/dynamic analysis because some of the tools are freely available (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default). Maybe you need to invest buying some desktop pc and switch.
The issue is without any doubt complicated. Who is to be blamed, the ICT developers or the netizens?
Are you scared? We should be!
