The Philippines’ first and only industry magazine that deals with safety and security matters pervading the environment today.

Seatbelt for Cyberspace

According to “hackers in wonderland”, your plain text email could just be a public property for them. In this present generation, we are extraordinarily dependent  on computers, and in no time, the Earth could already be a cyber space. In our day to day life, we always resort to email as one of the cheapest forms of communication worldwide. In this case, we are vulnerable since anyone can get an access to our private mails. Even a kid in a garage can guess our passwords; it is the favorite hackers’ game. What they consider as their holy grail is guessing or accessing the password of the root system. Root is the master key controlling the entire network. This is commonly used by most of our government and private institutions, banks, and other businesses on their mainframes.

One capability of the red hat hackers (extremely dangerous hackers) are penetrating a simulate web server and defacing a website. This could also be done by the hackers who are also activists in the so-called hacktivism. You can wake up one morning to see your website turned into a junk. They use the Trojan to access the target system. Trojan is a hacker’s tool; it is a concealed program that makes a hacker an invisible extra user in the system. It is also a virus named after the famous Trojan Horse that prompted the fall of Troy.

White hat hackers are the Mr. Nice Guy in the cyber world. They are the ones who are usually hired by small businesses and other organizations to fill the loopholes of their system security.

How about the security of common PC owners, owners who cannot afford to hire white hat hackers?  We can resort to antivirus programs to protect our system. I found out from TechMediaNetwork.com the best antivirus software products we can install to our systems. At the price of $29.95, we can have the BitDefender Antivirus which ranked No. 1 in the list. The proportion of people who buy this product is 90.84%. It has all the capability to eliminate the computer threats like viruses, spyware, malware, rootkit, and the like, as any antivirus are also capable of doing. But this could protect our emails, instant messaging, file sharing, and registry startup. This also has the complete feature to deliver our system from dialers, backdoor, hackers, and phishing that other antivirus softwares do not have. It has the complete identity theft protection on adware, active, vulnerabilities, cookies, and scripts. Next on the list is the Kaspersky antivirus at $59.95 and 2.86% is the proportion of people who buy this product. It has the capacity to do what BitDefender could but this one has the West Coast Lab Anti-malware. It is followed by Webroot antivirus at No.3 and costs $29.95. At No.4 is the Norton antivirus that costs not lesser than $39.99 which ranked as No. 1 last year.  Eset Nod32 antivirus made it to No.5 and has the same price as Norton’s.

The other software products will be featured on the next issue so you can have a wide range of options to choose depending on  what best suits your system. Moreover, Robert Steele, a former CIA spy who believes in the hacker’s viewpoint, said that; “Cybercrimes can be wiped out tomorrow by legislating diligent standards for corporations, because we are allowing the computer manufacturers, internet providers, etc. to sell equipment that is not good enough. Companies are stealing us blind by not protecting their formulas, intellectual properties, our bank accounts and identities.” Well I guess this could be the best antivirus solution to our system.