Online Threats

Today’s criminals are more sophisticated than ever and the attacks they launch are increasingly more complicated. Criminals tend to use multiple threats to increase their chance of infecting your computer and/or to spread the threat to other computers. They may also launch an attack to lay the foundation for future, more serious attacks like identity theft. If attacks are caught early, you can minimize any damage that could be caused to you or your household. Kindsight categorizes online threats as follows:

Identity Theft Threats

The Internet is providing new ways for people to steal your personal information and to commit identity theft. The threats that lead to identity theft are many and include:

• Keyloggers that transmit passwords, usernames and credit card numbers you use on your computer back to the thieves, among many others.
• Trojan horses that allow unauthorized access to one of your computers; and
• Phishing attacks where emails or pop-up messages are sent from what appear to be legitimate institutions that get you to reveal your personal information.

As well, many of these other threats outlined below can also lead to identity theft or set the stage for an identity theft attack on your computer.

Cybercrime Threats

Cybercrime refers to criminal activity where a computer or network is involved in a crime. In many cases, your computer unknowingly becomes infected and then attempts to do one or more of the following:

• Gain access to other computers over the Internet;
• Launch a denial of service attack against a website or network;
• Send Spam to other users;
• Control other computers from the Internet and used them to commit other crimes including those related to hacking, distribution of child pornography, and other serious offenses.

Spyware Threats

Spyware is software that you may have knowingly or unknowingly installed on your computer that performs additional activities for which you did not consent or for which you may not be aware.  These unwanted activities may include:

• Collecting information about a user or their computer or browsing habits;
• Redirecting Web browser activity to different web pages;
• Changing your computer’s settings or installing additional software that can result in lower computing performance and/or slower Internet speeds, and/or loss of Internet or functionality of other programs.

Computer Virus Threats

A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without your permission or knowledge. Viruses can also spread to other computers by email or when you connect to the Internet. The term “computer virus” is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to include computer viruses, worms, rootkits, and other exploits.

Once on your computer, many of these threats tend to show little to no symptoms so they can survive undetected or they can disable your anti-virus software without you being aware.

At the same time, less than 25% of computers are fully protected because the anti-virus software is not kept up-to-date, installed on all the computers in a home, or the operating system or other applications have not been patched to fix security holes. These issues highlight a fundamental flaw in today’s home network security and why an additional layer of protection is needed.