|
There are many routes that hackers can take advantage of to gain access to unprotected systems. An effective personal firewall is designed to secure your computer against various threats from the internet or your connected network, including:
Port intrusions
Hackers are scanning for vulnerable computers to steal data, corrupt data, destroy or to make use of in the future.
Remote Login
This is when somebody can log into your computer to access files to actually running programs on your computer.
Application Backdoors
Some programs contain ways to access your programs remotely. Others have bugs in the program that open backdoors, or hidden access that can allow remote access to these programs.
SMTP Session Hijacking - SMTP(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
This is the most popular way of transferring email over the internet. Hackers often gain access to peoples email address. A person can send unsolicited junk email(spam) to thousands of people using a person's host without them even being aware of this and it makes it very difficult to trace the origin of the emails.
Operating System Bugs
Like applications, some Operation Systems have backdoors, which can allow hackers to gain access to them.
Denial of Service (DDOS)
This type of attack is very hard to control. What a hacker does is send a msg to the victim's computer to make a connection, but when the answer is responded to the computer is unable to find the system. By causing a server to try to respond to these unanswered requests it will cause the system to slow down or eventually crash.
Email Bombs
These attacks are mostly personal attacks. Somebody sends you hundreds of the same email filling up you email account until you cannot accept any more emails.
Macros
Many applications allow you to make commands to help you control specific software more easily. Hackers take advantage of this by creating their own macros that will corrupt data or crash your computer.
Viruses and worms
Probably the most well known and still one of the largest threats to computers is a virus. A virus is a small program that will copy onto your system then copy from system to system very quickly. Virus or worms slip in through email attachments and links, weblinks and network or file transfers. These codes can do anything with your computer eg. destroy, corrupt or modify data, render your harddisk and even your operating system useless and then go on to copy itself into other connected systems ( via the internet or your LAN )
Trojans or spywares
After slipping in, they install themselves to collect data ( like visited websites, key presses, email messages, passwords and user names ) and transmits the data back to its command server.
Spam
Spam is typically harmless junkmail. Unfortunately some junk mail can be very dangerous if you click on one of the links provided. If click on one of these links you can accidentally accept a cookie that will open a backdoor to your computer.
| 
