Computer Security Threat

Defination of Computer Security:

A threat, in the context of computer security, refers to anything that has the potential to cause serious harm to a computer system. A threat is something that may or may not happen, but has the potential to cause serious damage. Threats can lead to attacks on computer systems, networks and  more.

Types of Computer Threats:

 

 

 

 

 

Malware: Malware is short for “malicious software.” Wikipedia describes malware as a term used to mean a “variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.” Malware could be computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, dishonest spyware, and malicious rootkits—all of which are defined below.

  Computer virus: A computer virus is a small piece of software that can spread from one infected computer to another. The virus could corrupt, steal, or delete data on your computer—even erasing everything on your hard drive. A virus could also use other programs like your email program to spread itself to other computers.

 Computer worm: A computer worm is a software program that can copy itself from one computer to another, without human interaction. Worms can replicate in great volume and with great speed. For example, a worm can send copies of itself to every contact in your email address book and then send itself to all the contacts in your contacts’ address books.

 Trojan horse: Users can infect their computers with Trojan horse software simply by downloading an application they thought was legitimate but was in fact malicious.

 Botnet: A botnet is a group of computers connected to the Internet that have been compromised by a hacker using a computer virus or Trojan horse. An individual computer in the group is known as a “zombie“ computer.

 Spam: Spam in the security context is primarily used to describe email spam —unwanted messages in your email inbox. Spam, or electronic junk mail, is a nuisance as it can clutter your mailbox as well as potentially take up space on your mail server. Unwanted junk mail advertising items you don’t care for is harmless, relatively speaking. However, spam messages can contain links that when clicked on could go to a website that installs malicious software onto your computer.