In a world where more businesses rely on computers for everyday business operations, security for a computer and its surrounding systems is crucial. Cybersecurity, computer safety, or information security is basically the protection of computer networks and systems from malicious information manipulation, theft of data, and/or destruction of their electronic information, and from the disruption or malfunctioning of their services they provide. It can also involve securing computer systems against hackers’ attacks to prevent the destructive or malicious dissemination of information that could result from security weaknesses found in these systems. The overall goal is to defend systems from outside attacks which are either through malware, viruses, and so on, or intentional or unintentional, strategic attacks by intruders.
As part of the wider field of strategic internet threats, malware, viruses, and other potentially harmful applications are being developed and released into the public domain by those who wish to gain illegal access to confidential data or systems. In some cases, malware has been known to have been used for fraud, such as in identity theft. Cybersecurity measures can involve defending against such attacks. One of the most common forms of this kind of cyber attack is known as “malware”, which means “badware”. This is because malwares can do whatever it sets out to do – damage, delete, corrupt files, etc – but they can do it without having any knowledge or permission from the operating system, as is often the case when malware is developed and deployed through the use of Trojans, backdoor applications, exploit code, etc.
A variety of technologies are used to defend a network from malware attacks, including antivirus software and firewall security measures. Antivirus software acts as one of the most basic forms of information security measures. When an infected program begins to execute, it first seeks out its way through the firewall security measures built into the OS, and then checks the data that it requires to find. If it finds what it needs, the infected file is then decoded, and if it can’t be decoded a virus is created to try and compromise the computer’s safety.