A Brief Look at what are Online Threats?

I do remembered the first time when i touched a PC back in 1998. I still recall looking like an all-time noob, smoothing my hands on the keyboard and monitor of my parents' now totally outdated PC. When i, for the first time, entered the Microsoft Windows 95 world, feel the seemingly classy GUI & taskbar (100% not anymore now that i owned Vista...:)) and wondering what computer games the computer vendor helps install, i noticed the vendor was installing a software which i barely had any ideas about.

I: "What was that?"
Vendor: "It's called Norton Antivirus."
I: "Is it some kind of computer game?"
Vendor: "?!@$%"

The vendor laughed hard back then. But as i'm not allowed to touch a PC for more than 3 hours a week before i graduate from middle school education (sometimes i suffered numbers of 1-hour penalty for scoring bad marks for my school exams), i did not ponder on what is exactly Norton Antivirus, having put all of my efforts into computer gaming. Even when my enthusiasm for computer gaming is dying down to an almost nil level (thanks to my mother...=.=), i still did not try to learn what is an antivirus.

However, after i entered University studies where knowing how to operate a PC is like knowing how to survive, I gradually understood what is Antivirus, having learnt the ways of basic computering for at least 5-10 hours a day. But i also learnt that antivirus software is only part of the story on which the vendor did not tell me 11 years back then.

Online Threats. Internet Security. Privacy Protection.

I realized how computerly uncivilized i was prior to the last couple of years. It was such an inportant stuff for computer users to grasp. How could i have miss that???

And so here i am, after learning the mistakes of so many years, trying to provide sparse information on what is truly classified as "online threats". Below are the list of online threats which i will describe on further posts:

1. Malwares (deals with all your viruses, spywares, adwares, worms & rootkits)
   
2. Keyloggers (for both keyboard, webcams & clipboards)
   
3. Network attacks [commonly refered to as Denial-of-Service attacks (DOS)]
   
4. Trojan Horses (Downloaders, Backdoors etc)
   
5. Phishing
   
6. PC Hijacking (PC Hacking)
   
7. Clickjacking (This threat is relatively new; it's not popular yet but certainly will)
   
8. Botnets/Zombie Computer (closely related to network attacks)
   
9. Spams
10. Traffic analysis (The most underrated threat in my opinion)
    

I will try to give you general information on which i have learnt (doing research on these topics consumes huge amount of time), and so i will most definitely make a few mistakes here and there. Do correct me via comments if something similar happened.

On the other hand, you'll notice that i will post articles on certain internet security software (those antivirus & antispyware stuffs) every once a while after posting this article. This is because i noticed that some people only had ideas on famed PC security stuffs such as Norton and AVG that they did not notice the other equally great stuffs. With future articles, i hope to bring you out of the well and give a broader look at the internet security world.

Till then, take care!!! :)