Week 13 was all about computer security, ethics and privacy. I learned about how every year millions of people become victims of cyber crimes such as phishing, spamming, theft, fraud, cyber stalking and in severe cases identity theft. Throughout this chapter I learned about the simple ways to protect myself and my family from cyber crimes. Some of the ways to enhance my computers security include, turning on my spam blocker, enabling my firewall, updating my anti-virus software, protecting my personal information and monitoring what other people do on my computer. When it comes to your safety there is no such thing as going to far. Another extremely useful thing I learned during this chapter was how to prevent your password from being discovered. I was amazed to find out that for a password that contains ten characters there are 3,700,000,000,000,000 possible combinations. This would take a computer 59 years to crack and a person over 580 million years! I usually have passwords that run between 7-8 characters including numbers now that I know how just a few characters can make such a drastic improvement to the security of my personal information.
All and all, chapter 13 was an eye opening experience to me. I always knew about hackers and scripts, but I never knew how susceptible I am to getting my identity stolen by just logging onto an un-secure link and downloading a virus.
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