The Pros And Cons Of Internet Privacy

Internet is a globally connected network of computers for exchange of data, views and news. Currently, there are almost 3,037,608,300 internet users all over the world and every second almost 8 new users get exposed to the world of internet. The internet provides a revolutionary new way of conceiving and sharing information. The information streams in the order of zeroes and ones through the internet at great speed. But as everything as a flip side, the internet poses a huge risk to everyone who uses it. As sharing increases over the internet, one’s privacy is hampered. Hacking has resulted in private information being accessed and misused. Viruses, Malwares and Trojans have made the entire internet experience really unsafe. Computer viruses

There are multiple types of cyber-attacks that destroy businesses and hamper the economy. Some of them are spear phishing and malicious intrusion using codes. I will be discussing two examples, one for small-scale businesses and the other for larger firms. The first one is an example of spear phishing. Spear Phishing involves sending of e-mails that appear genuine but are actually spams. The email could be winning of lottery amount or from an employer. Spear phishing scams work to gain access to a company’s entire computer system. The example is about a medium sized window manufacturer in India that relied heavily on emails to conduct business. The company had installed spam filters in order to shield the firm from cyber-attacks, but some fraudulent emails still went through. In one such case, the email appeared to be from the Finance Department and required some information including passwords. The employee gave the information in the email not realizing it was a fraudulent email and the firm faced great financial losses as their entire data got wiped out. This is one of the most common reasons for small and medium sized businesses to shut down, thus hampering the economy. The situation could have been easily avoided had the employee contacted the person in charge. The second example is a large manufacturing firm which was working for NASA. The firm had been attacked by a malicious virus which crashed the company’s server and deleted the company’s data. The firm lost millions of dollars and had to lay off workers to recover the