Keeping the Hackers Out

The term hacker goes back to the late '50s and early '60s and grew from the lexicon of college students and researchers who pioneered the computing industry.

As opposed to these early hackers, the term today is used very loosely by the media and almost always to describe some negative activity. Unfortunately this has had the effect of celebrating and mystifying the kind of activity that really is no more significant than vandalism.

Below are some common misperceptions about how to protect yourself against hacking.

I don't have anything on my computer. No one would want to break into my computer.

The best analogy is to think of the bank robbers who steal an ordinary car to be used in their getaway. Cyber thieves and vandals scour the Internet for computers they can control. This allows them to boldly launch attacks and spam on bigger targets because those attacks will appear to be coming from someone else's computer -- namely yours.

Computers that have been taken over some cyber vandal are often referred to as "zombies." Often there may be little indicate your computer has become a zombie. It has reached the point where there are zombie networks, some projected to be near 100,000 total computers. With this power at their disposal, such thieves and vandals can bring down large corporate networks or even segments of the Internet.

I'm safe because I have virus software or a firewall

While these are pieces of a good security approach, they are far from complete. Many attacks take advantage of programming bugs in your computer's operating system (e.g. Windows). Anti-virus software won't necessarily help in these cases. You need to actively update or "patch" all your software.

Even with anti-virus software, many people never update the software leaving themselves vulnerable to any new virus.

A major threat today is referred to as "mobile code," small programs that can reside within a Web page. These can be good (such as being able to update your Microsoft software by going to www.microsoft.com), but the same technology can be used maliciously, and a lot of protection software might not catch this kind of code because it might look like an ordinary Web page.

One option may be using a browser like Mozilla or Opera instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). These browsers don't have all the capabilities of IE and as such don't open you up to as many dangers.

I always delete my cookies after browsing the Web.

Cookies got a bad rap. A cookie is a little piece of information a Web site sends to your computer. The Web site can automatically retrieve that information when you visit again. A cookie can be sort of like an ID badge. But unscrupulous marketers also can use them to elicit all sorts of personal and browsing information about you. While cookies are a nuisance, and perhaps are abused, in terms of security, they should not be as much a concern as things like operating-system updates and virus software.

I have a router so hackers can't get to my computers

A router allows a network to communicate with itself and other networks. If you want to have more than one computer sharing one Interent connection (such as DSL or cable modem), you will need a router. In this sense the router becomes the piece of equipment the Internet sees. It is the go-between (often these kinds of routers are called gateways) for your private network and the Internet. Routers can protect you because they hide your home network from the Internet. However, they are not foolproof. One issue is that routers themselves are easy to break into because people do not reset the default passwords they ship with. Another issue is that some malware simply crosses over the router.