Computer Literacy

 Importance of Computer Literacy

One of the most important skills to have while operating in the technical world is computer literacy. People must understand that they leave “digital footprints” through the actions they make online (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). Stuff as simple as making posting a picture or interacting through an app’s chat function can have negative effects on individuals.

Ping Attacks- One of the more notable ways criminals commit cyber attacks is through Pinging. Hackers use multiple infected computers, also known as a botnet, to send a large amount of Ping requests to target networks. This is known as a Ping flood, which is a type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The network is quickly overwhelmed and becomes inaccessible to legitimate parties (imperva, N.D.). These kinds of attacks can do serious damages to professional entities as they slow their networks down and can create a complete work stoppage, due to the inability of real requests getting through. A couple of ways that industries can defend themselves against ping floods are by setting a threshold on the number of requests that can be processed in certain time frames, and by installing third party software. These two methods can block and filter out what may be malicious requests (Klusaite, 2023).

Phishing Attacks- Phishing attacks are cyber-attacks that aim to gain sensitive information from businesses and individuals. Hackers typically use phishing scams through email, by providing a malicious link in the body of the email and disguising their email, making it look like it is from a reliable source (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). Once you click on the link, it redirects you to phony site to enter your information in. Unfortunately, many people fall to scams like this and end up compromising themselves and others. One way you can protect yourself from phishing attacks are by hovering your mouse over suspicious links, this can expose the real target link, helping you to avoid clicking it. Another way that you can counter scams like this may be to sign in to your account from the actual site, this can help you to determine if the message and link you received are legit (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). My place of work has fortunately kept us all up to date and prepared us on what to look for when reading our emails.

Password Cracking- Individuals’ carelessness in password protection is another that can cause serious harm to them and their organizations. Computers may have functions built into them that give you the option to save passwords. While this provides a convenient way to sign into accounts faster, this should only ever be done on personal devices. Doing this on public devices gives criminals an easy way to login and use your credentials in simple and easy ways causing damage to the company that individual may work for. To provide extra protection and deter any password cracking attempts from criminal’s individuals should enable a 2-factor authentication function when logging into their accounts. By doing this you ensure that a code is sent to a personal device or recovery email only you have access to (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). This makes it virtually impossible for a criminal to hack an account, seeing as they will not have access to the security code that was sent to the individual to confirm the login. Having this setup not only notifies the user that someone is attempting to login to an account but also provides them with a good reason to update their password as well.

References

imperva. (N.D.). Ping flood (ICMP flood). a Thales company. https://www.imperva.com/learn/ddos/ping-icmp-flood/

Klusaite, L. (2023, October 26).  Ping flood attack: How it works and how you can defend against it. NordVPN. https://nordvpn.com/blog/ping-flood/

Vahid, F. & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks. TEC 101: Fundamentals of Information Technology & Literacy | zyBooks