Most of us cannot avoid using computers whether in the workplace or at home. Users face dangers when their computer systems are connected to the Internet. The computer is used for multiple roles, e.g. emailing, web-surfing, on-line banking, playing games, word processing, home accounting and completing work brought home. Due to the complexities of the operating system and application software a number of flaws exist which can be exploited by attackers to compromise the machine and or trick the user into revealing sensitive information such as user names and passwords used for Internet banking.

The attackers (or hackers) have many and varied motives. These days the primary motive is financial gain for the attacker. This can be achieved by for example hijacking your machine to send out large volumes of spam (junk) messages for fake prescription medicines and other unsavoury or illegal products.

We run the risk of our identities being stolen, our bank accounts being cleaned out by the attackers, our computers being hijacked, our precious data being deleted or stolen.

Lets put the risks into some sort of context

The following list is just a small sub-set of the risks.

• An un-secured PC connected to the Internet will probably be probed and compromised within about 30 minutes of connecting to the Internet. By this we mean if you buy a brand new PC and take it home and connect it to the Internet without taking any special precautions it will be quickly compromised and it will probably be attacked almost immediately.

• Approximately two thirds of all email messages in 2005 were spam (unwanted junk mail). If you do not take special precautions you will probably start to receive spam emails.

• Just by visiting a malicious web-site you can have you machine compromised and malicious software loaded on it which will spy on your every keystroke.

• Did you know that sending an email is like sending a postcard, on route, it can be read by the postman and anyone else who can get access to it?

• Criminal gangs deliberately compromise computer systems to steal user names and passwords used to access Internet bank accounts, online auction sites e.g. ebay, e-commerce sites, etc.

• Hard disks (used to store your data inside computers) and other computer hardware fails frequently, different manufactures publish figures called MTBF (“mean time between failures”) however, a percentage of disks will fail before this time and while lucky ones last longer. Given sufficient time all computers fail.

• Your private data can be exposed if you give away or sell your computer without first securely erasing the hard disk. Deleting data the data or refomatting the disk won't protect you!

It is lot easier to secure your computer system, rather than trying to recover from an attack, money stolen from your account or identity theft!

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