Network Security

Network security is a battle that computer users have fought since the advent of personal PC’s and data sharing over the internet and continues to be important to this day as companies gather large databases of customer data and people store more information on personal devices.  In the book Internet of Things Security: Fundamentals, Techniques and Applications it explained “Since its evolution, the smart devices of the IoT framework have been efficiently delivering their operations. But they also face certain threats to users and their personal data because of the ever-expanding network” (Shandilya, S. K., & Nagar, A. 2018). Working in the telecommunications field I experience many network security situations at my job, and I’ll talk about two specific spams the gift card email scams and a form of social engineering known as hooking done on social media websites. 

 The first scam would be the gift card email scam where the attacker will pose as the government and claim that you owe the IRS a large sum of money and to reach out to a number to fix the issue. This is a 419 scam the textbook explains, “is a particular scam where the scammer establishes contact with an individual to help with a business transaction like transferring money out of a country, for which the individual will supposedly receive a large payment.” (Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. 2019). In this case the person being scammed is asked to purchase gift cards and when they read the gift card number to the scammer the cards are emptied, and the money is gone. Two ways to avoid these scams are users being careful of links or attachments on emails even when coming from a business you know this links or attachments can contain malware or viruses, and even take users to sites that look legit and scare them into payments. The second would be installing firewalls and antivirus software in order to protect yourself if an email scam was to trick you and compromise your device the textbook explains, “In addition, firewalls cannot block all threats and are best used in conjunction with antivirus software” (Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. 2019).  

The second scam would be hooking where a scammer makes contact with a user online and attempts to make a relationship and then get money from the user. At my job we have seen this done by people making fake Instagram profiles or getting the sign-in information of a friend of the user then reaching out about a new business that they are a part of only to ask for money or worse send a link to reset the user's password and take their account. We have also seen scammers ask for payment information so they can pay for the service on their side only for the user's card to be emptied in the next few minutes or malware is added causing pop-ups on the user's device. A good way to avoid this is to check that when you receive messages from friends that this is actually from your friends' profile that you are friends within the social media app. The second would be to attempt to never give payment information on a webpage that isn't secure and encrypting the data as it enters to protect yourself. The internet can be a scary place, but a careful user can save themselves time and money when avoiding these scams. 

Resources: 

Shandilya, S. K., & Nagar, A. (2018). Internet of things security: fundamentals, techniques and     applications. River Publishers. 

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.