Chapter 6 Summary
After reviewing Chapter 6 this chapter was mainly focused on internet protection, different threats, and different protections that are used for each sort of protocol. I have always been fairly interested in keeping my internet identity and my connections safe. This is when I learned about the two types of securities and the differences between them, which are logical/physical. They’re pretty self explanatory but when you actually think about it in a different way you realize why they are classified as which. Physical security includes things such as safes, locks on doors, and sound alarms. These are all things that people would typically have around their house, or businesses. The other type of security is logical security, and this is the one us IT folks have to really be on top of. Logical security includes passwords, encryption, and firewalls. Not only is there security, but there are also different types of threats not only physically and also digitally. There are many different types of threats but the big main ones include integrity threats which means data gets altered, necessity threats which means access to data or an account is blocked, and then secrecy threats which are when data gets exposed to a group or multiple groups of people.
In this chapter another very important topic was talking about how and what encryption and cryptography actually are and how they work. I’ve always been aware of encrypted files, passwords, data, etc but I never understood how it fully worked. When you want to encrypt something, you are putting readable data into text that is coded in a very odd way, (random letters + numbers) and is put into algorithms and keys, and then obviously decryption is where you turn it back into readable data. When using my bank app every single day and my messaging apps, the idea of encryption is obviously there to protect all of your sensitive information, but I never really understood how they fully worked. There are private key and public key encryptions, which are basically just levels of keys and are based on how hard they are to break into.
One of my favorite topics from this chapter was definitely about the super common everyday security threats such as phishing, identity theft, and DOS attacks or ‘Denial of Service” attacks. These are all of the ones that everyone is aware about but are so easy to fall into by not being aware of what you click, what sites you visit, and who you’re receiving messages from. I personally have never been the victim of a DOS attack, or identity theft, but I have gotten hit with a phishing scam before. When I was younger I clicked a link on Steam messenger for a trading link for a game I was playing, Rocket League, and 10 minutes after clicking the link I got an email about my steam account saying the email/password had been changed… that easy! And luckily Steam support was very helpful and I received my account back in less than 24 hours.