8 Most Common Online Threats You Should Know About

What are the most common online threats? The internet has never really been the safe place we all want it to be. From its creation, to the modern day, the online space we dwell in on a daily basis is crawling with the most common online threats you should know about. Expanding on our list of the 7 ways to protect your privacy online, this article will show you certain things you should carefully look out for, ranked by their severity and compiled by me after sanity checking with the security or networking giants out there such as Cisco and Norton.

The world wide web is maturing faster than a lot of us can mentally grasp and get comfortably used to. While in its early days, people with malicious intents could “hack” into your data in a very restricted variety of ways, it was fairly simple to do that as security had not yet caught up with all the risks out there. As the Web and the content on it matured and became more and more complex and intricate, security had to follow it and thus – all the attack vectors one could imagine had to find ways of coming through and exploiting either the user’s own naive behavior and stupidity or mistakes that were made in the code of the web browser or website/webapp. As you might suspect, finding such a gaping hole in an application one might deem worthy of attacking and extracting data from is really hard to do.

Online security is taken very seriously by anyone whose services people widely use so what attackers are mostly left with is exploiting the one bug that will never be patched – the user. Through ads, rogue pop ups that imitate error messages or many other means, people will try to make you manually allow their attack to penetrate whatever defense stands between you and them because more often than not, you can easily override any warning. Albeit there being a flashy word of caution which screams at you to hit the back button or just get out of there somehow, people are sometimes just determined to mess things up.

Let’s take a look at the most common ways you can mess up online and how badly they can affect you.

8. Spam

Severity: Very Low

There is probably some spam waiting for you once you turn your eyes away from this article and we are not talking about the ham. Everyone online experiences it at some point and it can range from the once-in-a-blue-moon email to a pestering torrent of messages, purposed to clutter your inbox. Spam, however, remains just a nuisance.

7. Rogue Pop – Ups

Severity: Low

“CAUTION: Your Computer is Infected with Viruses. Click here to scan  now!” – says the poorly designed site of unknown origins in a pop up window that has been painstakingly fashioned to look like a system error message or even like some of the most popular antivirus program pop ups. However, these are easy to spot and dismiss.

6. Fake Downloads

Severity: Low to Moderate

Finding the correct download link on a page that has a dozen of them has become the big struggle of the new generations. Sometimes, they can get quite tricky by mimicking the file you intend to download and even the careful user can execute a malicious download file by mistake sometimes but that is fairly rare.  

5. Adware

Severity: Moderate

A type of computer virus, the fifth of the most common online threats you should know about is “adware” (standing for advertising software) is the type of malicious file that, once in your system, will make ads of whatever its creator desired to your desktop, sometimes without the ability to get rid of them. Often times it is difficult to get rid of if it infects sensitive files.

4. Botnet

Severity: Moderate to High

Executing another type of virus can turn your computer into a part of a botnet – a network of infected computers which receive and execute commands without their users even realizing it. It uses up resources and makes your work impossible to carry out sometimes.

3. Spyware

Severity: Very High

Spyware means trouble. Essentially, spying software is a bunch of malicious code that is not out there to find out what you’re doing on a day to day basis and report to a distant socialist nation but instead steal your sensitive data such as passwords and numbers of all sorts.

2. Phishing / Spoofing

Severity: Very High

This is one of the most dangerous threats out there because it doesn’t require you to download anything, unlike the other *ware threats. Phishing is the art of making you believe you’re on the website you intend to be while you’re actually on a site hosted by an attacker who is waiting for you to enter your data and use it to their heart’s content.

1. Ransomware

Severity: Very High

Ransomware has recently become a thing. In my opinion, the most dangerous of the most common online threats you should know about, ransomware infects important files you use or your computer depends on and threatens to corrupt/destroy them if you don’t pay a sum to an online banking account.