Network Security

An era of technology has glorified the gaming world and thus, players are taking video games seriously, more so than their own real world life. The dedicated hours each player spends on games can consume their daily lifestyle, emotions, and mental state. As games become more competitive, a small amount of players result in hacking to rise through the ranks. The most commonly used hack is executing a series of ping attacks that flood an internet protocol address with data packets, called DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). This type of attack and render a player’s connectivity to close out or make the user lag in game. Just like in video games, this type of attack can happen anywhere in which case, the DDoSD (Distrusted Denial Service Defense) has taken on the challenge to address those issues of attacks using systems to counteract the large scale of packets. For instance, the University of Oregon have been developing a software-defined networking system called “The Drawbridge” which can be used to block DDoS from attacking the flowed traffic to an organization by implementing the drawbridge at the ISP (Internet Service Provider) traffic point. Doing so should prevent undesirable traffic from reaching an organization’s network (DHS, 2022). As DDoS can make a user feel vulnerable, two other commonly used computer security threats can occur that can leave a computer vulnerable to a breach in security as users leave a digital footprint surfing the web. Digital footprints consist of all information collected by the services used and online activities (Vahid & Lysecky, 2017). The first threat called “Phishing” is the type of attack that can potentially steal personal information like, passwords, usernames, bank info, etc. What makes computer systems vulnerable to this type of threat is, without a proper anti-phishing software, one could not know that he or she may have been phished until it is too late. Two good recommendations for protecting a computer system or network is by utilizing a spam filter to protect against spam emails and changing web content settings to block fraudulent websites from opening (Phishing, 2022). The second threat called “Password Cracking” is an illegal brute force attempt to systematically guess the victims password until success. What makes this vulnerable to computer systems is the hacker having passwords to all kinds of websites such as, banks. According to AVG, ways to protect against password cracking is to create a uniquely long password with a minimum amount of 16 characters that can should include a variety of special characters, numbers, and a mix of upper and lowercase lettering, as well as installing an anti-virus software which can come with an password protection tool that notifies the user if a password was attempted before it is breached (2022).

References

AVG. (2022). Password cracking techniques hackers use and how to avoid them. Passwords.

https://www.avg.com/en/signal/password-cracking-techniques-hackers-use

DHS. (2022). Distributed Denial of Service Defense. Department of Homeland Security.

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/ddosd

Phishing. (2022). Prevent phishing attacks. What is phishing?

https://www.phishing.org/what-is-phishing

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for all. zybooks.zyante.com/