ISP secures my broadband?

Well that’s a too obvious question and there is NO such Internet Service Provider (ISP) that guarantees protection of your personal computer from any forms of internet threats. When you buy ISP’s packaged service subscription, you will only get a broadband connection line with some time bombed or trail version anti-virus software to protect your computer from threats. This has been done by many ISP’s to get as many customers to take their service subscription. The customer often mistakenly thinks the ISP will protect their broadband connection which is too much to expect from an ISP.

The fact is if, you are ready to take the responsibility for the security of your computer, then go ahead and buy a cheap broadband package. There are also some other factors which might makes you to think twice before jumping on the security aspect of a broadband connection like

• You are aware of the risks going online
• You are going increase your knowledge by reading about those risk and take precautionary measures to stay secure
• You will implement necessary hardware or software and implement the best practices to remain risk free
• You will continue to stay update about the new threats in the market and there cures.

The risks can be internal or external from where a computer can be approached and compromised

External Threats: We all know intrusion attempts will be continued whenever users are connected to internet and there is nothing someone can do about it. This is the way internet has been formed and continues to go in future most likely. It all happens when your computer is identified as online and a hacker makes several attempts to get into the PC through a week open void or port and once a hacker enters inside, he’s free to pick, choose and copy his interest areas.

There are several ways in which your personal information can be taken away by an outsider or hacker. The hackers don’t have specifically search for a victim, they simply uses following ways like

• What subnet to target today
• Scan the subnet with available utilities to check for those who are available online
• Pin point one of live computer and start probing for loop hole to gain access
• Once connected to the computer, do whatever with the available content

Internal threats: like external threats, we got internal threats which work on the same platform. A hacker could SPAM the network using a malicious email which when opened, collects the desired information from the user’s computer and send it to the hacker over the routable internet. Once the session is established between your computer and hacker’s terminal, your data, files and folders are at risk. All that needs to be done is to attract the user to install that program by offering some good incentives which are bogus after all. The Malware does its job pretty well and there are other methods of internal attacks like Viruses, Email scripted executable (.exe, .vbs, .js, .ocx, .dll) attachments (normally used to place Trojans), web pharming which is used to redirect users to bogus websites to perform operations like phishing attack, rouge dialers, key loggers, spyware etc.