Top 8 Dreadful Online Threats Terrorizing Computer Users

In today’s technology-driven world everyone uses the internet to cater to their needs. As per Statistica, in 2017, an estimated 1.66 billion people worldwide purchase goods online. During the same year, global e-retail sales amounted to 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars and projections show a growth of up to 4.48 trillion U.S. dollars by 2021. But do you think it to be completely safe?

Sometimes when we open an attachment from our mail or a website a malicious program enters our PC known as a virus which is very dangerous and can lead to crashing our computer and make it slow. Through these viruses, our sensitive information can be leaked and misused. Computer threats can be a nightmare for you that can cause extensive damage to your system. This can even disrupt the performance of the system.

So do you know the most dreadful online threats that people face while surfing online?

Viruses

Online users have a constant fear of viruses. These malicious programs can use all your important information that you store or type on your PC that can be quite troublesome. There are different types of virus some of which are very harmful while others are still less.

A recent case happened with a famous company where people were attacked by a virus, named CryptoLocker. This attack usually makes an appearance disguised as an email attachment. In October 2013, a number of staff members at the company in Scotland opened an email attachment and unleashed the virus, which began to encrypt the network files. The malware then displayed a message offering to decrypt the files subject to a payment of $300 being received. If the company had an Antivirus Protection then this would not have been the case.

Adware

Do you often see unwanted ads when browsing the internet using your web browser? These ads are mostly sent with the intention to redirect you to an advertising website and collect data about you which is useful for marketers. This includes information such as your email id, company name, location, contact number, etc. Adware is also used to download malware on your computer.

Worms

Emails and USBs are the most common medium through which worm travel to your computer system. Once they are in, worms send themselves to each and every email id on your system, thus infecting more systems. Since the email goes through your email account, most of the receivers are likely to consider it genuine and harmless and click it.

Trojans

These harmful elements enter your system by masking themselves as some genuine and useful software. But when you download it, your system gets infected by a trojan which aims at stealing information from your system. The information is then sent to the hacker who uses it for his personal benefit.

Hackers

While surfing online you also have a risk of internet monsters that are constantly monitoring your online activities. All the moves and actions that we take on our PC’s turn out into a data point that can prove out to be useful information for the hackers which they can share quite easily. Hackers use our personal computers to perform different sort of tasks. Hacking sessions are seen to be very dangerous as it becomes really very difficult to convince the hacker to give back all your information and stop accessing your system any further.

Phishing

Phishing is another threat that consumers face while working over the internet. Phishing is the illegal attempt to acquire sensitive and personal information such as a person’s username, account password, credit card details and much more that can be used for malicious reasons.

Data Tampering

Data tampering is also a very risky online activity as through this a smart hacker can enter false, fabricated and fraudulent data into the system and can change or delete all the existing files. This type of virus is very harmful to organizations as it is a big loss for them and they can lose on a great deal of money.

Spyware

Sometimes as you are surfing the internet, there is someone who is continuously spying on you and making complete note of all your activities. This is also one of the most dreadful online threats that constantly monitor all your online activities and installs programs without your consent that can be very hazardous.

This blog has been updated with the latest information.