Internet Security

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the Internet. Sometimes they do seemingly harmless acts, such as just going into a computer system and observing, but at other times, they steal, destroy or alter data. On some occasions, these cyber-felons perform even more malicious acts, such as infecting systems with "viruses," computer programs that "infect" the systems by latching onto other programs and eventually destroying them. Another favorite activity of the hacker is to gain access to the computer system and then manually either delete files or cause the computer to do "strange" things, such as placing messages on the screen that either make no sense or have an unusual meaning. Before we look at who has the responsibility to protect the end user, we must first look at what the truth is behind all the "security breaches." There is almost regular notice in the media of a "backdoor" or "bug" in a program: an error in the coding of the program that allows the knowledgeable hacker to access the computer system of someone ...

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PowerPoint has been installed on the individual computer system. That important item of information failed to make it into the more mainstream reports, such as the television news, leaving the uninformed worried about a "glitch" that had no affect on them. This caused thousands of people to hurry onto the Internet to find a patch to the "glitch," thereby slowing down the connections to the Internet. More recently, on June 12, 1997, the Associated Press reported on a bug in Netscape's Navigator web browser. According to the article, the glitch "lets Web site operators read anything on a hard drive of a personal computer logged onto the site." PC Magazine and CNNfn ran their own tests for ...

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