two ways to protect your computer from viruses

There are also social engineering techniques that can be done via text chat, in-person or in email. Sometimes the information isn’t obviously sensitive. The hacker will pose as a technician or an authority and ask for information. One common tactic is to phone someone, such as a secretary or low-level technical staff at a company. So, rather than taking a strong technological system on, hackers will target the weaknesses in human psychology. A system is only as strong as its weakest link and, more often than not, that weak link is a human being. It’s easy to think of hackers using high-tech methods to break into systems, but the truth is that the strongest tool in a hacker’s arsenal doesn’t involve computers at all. It’s the black hat variety that we’re all meant to be wary of. These are malicious computer experts who are out to make money or simply sow anarchy. As the name suggests, grey hats can be criminal, but not malicious.īlack hat hackers are the boogeymen that most people think of when you use the word. For example, a grey hat may do an unsolicited penetration test on someone’s system and then let them know about it afterwards. Grey hat hackers also don’t deliberately do harm, but they aren’t above breaking the law in order to satisfy their curiosity or find holes in a security system. Instead, they’ll report to the client and help them devise a fix for their security vulnerability. If they manage to break in, they’ll steal or damage nothing.

For example, a company wanting to test their network security may hire a white hat hacker to do a “penetration test”. These hackers never break the law and everything they do is with the consent of their targets. White Hat hackers are also referred to as “ethical” hackers. There are three kinds of hackers: white hat, grey hat and black hat. It used to be that legal hackers insisted that criminal hackers be referred to as “crackers”, but the term never really stuck in the mainstream. Let’s start off by clearing up a few misconceptions.

Two ways to protect your computer from viruses