Journal #7

This week’s Journal is asking how to tell if a computer is safe, and this is a very hard question to answer, and it really depends on quite a few circumstances. The first key circumstance is whether the computer is owned by the user or a public computer. Public computers have a higher threat than a personal computer that has anti-virus. this is because the user does not know who has used it before and what software is on it. The next aspect of whether a computer is secure or not is if there is a form of anti-virus downloaded on the computer. Simple anti-virus software can protect a computer from many attacks that can occur when browsing websites on the internet. A simple anti-virus is considered a basic form of protection but it is not in any form super safe, it still can be bypassed and have attacks occur on it. The next level up of safe would be having an anti-virus as well as a firewall. Firewalls block IP addresses that are programmed to be blocked. It can also be configured to block all unknown IPs except for a set of IP’s this helps to make it so hackers have an even harder time getting through to the host machine. The final and most secure would be using the last two and adding a VPN. A VPN in basic terms masks a user’s IP by using another host to make it seem that is where the data is coming from. THis is very secure and makes it very hard to attack a computer on a VPN. That is how to tell if computers are safe.

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