General  

1. Virus. These are programs which attack your data or applications on your computer. They can arrive on your computer attached to an email or on a disk. They continually change and new ones are produced all the time. There are thousands of different types out there, some of them have caused major problems and have become well known - Code Red for example. 
2. Intrusion. The techniques used by Internet software developers which enable Browsers, Email clients and other types of software (for example FTP) to work can also be used to gain access to your computer to perform non useful acts - for example record your keystrokes when logging into sites. i.e. capture login and password information. You are unlikely to know that it is happening or has happened until it is too late.

Both suppliers also supply Internet Security/Firewall software. These products block all access to your computer other than by techniques which you authorise and by computers which you authorise therefore preventing Intrusion attacks.

If you have or are developing your own website you need to consider security issues if you are going to ask visitors to that site to submit information or look at informati on. This might be ecommerce information, credit cards etc or confidential information. You must protect both your users and yourself by making sure that the data passing between your website and the users browser is safe. This is done by encrypting it. All browsers support Digital Certificates. Also known by various other names - SSL, Security keys and others. Basically you buy one for your server and or domain and install it as part of its configuration. Data from and to pages within that domain or server which are accessed by https will be encrypted thereby preventing unauthorised usage.

Click here to visit our SSL, Digital Certificate, Security section.

You must protect your computer when you connect to the Internet. There are people who create Viruses. These are just programs written by developers who do it for a variety of reasons the main one being notoriety. Mirroring life, there are harmless viruses and deadly ones. Some of them access information on your computer and do little else, others look for specific information - bank accounts, credit card information for fraud purposes and others cause damage to your operating system environment which usually requires removing everything from your computer and re-installing everything. This will result in lots of wasted time, cost and sadly in many cases the loss of important information because it was not backed up or because the backup was also infected.