![]() To date, such attacks are purely within the domain of the Internet, but as the Internet becomes more all-encompassing, it begins to encompass telephone calls (Skype, Vonage, 802.11-based voice calling), electronic faxing, electronic bank statements, etc. They can be quite destructive, but are not personal. The most numerous attacks are automated and indiscriminate caused by viruses, worms, and trojan horses. The Internet hosts a great many bad actors. Spend some time considering your requirements and planning how to satisfy them. Daily access should be as quick and unobtrusive as you can safely manage, to avoid wasting time on security. Systems used on a weekly basis should be reasonably convenient. Infrequently accessed systems may use long and esoteric passwords, so long as you have confidence in remembering or retrieving the passwords when needed. With SSH, keep in mind a) what you are protecting, b) who you are protecting it from, and c) how it's legitimately used. Such problems are often "self-correcting" - people faced with systems they consider unrealistically complicated tend to ignore them, reverting back to simpler (and less secure) systems, such as personal email accounts, telephones and faxes for communication, or posting passwords on monitors or under keyboards. With encryption it's easy to go overboard, using too much encryption, too many keys/passwords, and too many hoops to jump through. ![]() Missile codes and medical research demand stronger protection than everyday email. If the more secure way to do something takes twice as long, but reduces the chance of a successful attack by 10%, is it worth taking the more secure route? That depends on how long the action takes otherwise, how frequently it occurs, and the initial likelihood of compromise (before shaving away that 10% chance) - it also depends on how bad a compromise would be. When devising a security strategy, it's necessary to be secure enough, but also to recognize the point of diminishing returns. ![]() It's also mostly useless, although there are a few high-security applications which actually justify a computer which spend most of its time shut down or disconnected from the outside world. It's a truism that the most secure computer is not only not connected to the Internet, but actually switched off. Alternatively, you might trade money (pay) for more secure equipment, or spend more time to accomplish a task. Security is always a trade-off, usually giving up some convenience to have better security. How Much Is Too Much: Secure or Overboard? Just as people demand SSL encryption (indicated by the lock icon in web browsers) from web sites to protect their credit card and banking details from identity fraudsters, SSH offers similar protection for logging into and moving files to and from remote computers, as well as flexible tunneling to protect other Internet communications. Similarly, FTP is being gradually phased out by sftp, a secure FTP alternative included in the SSH suite. Instead of undergoing the kind of metamorphosis SMTP has experienced to grow up into the often-malevolent Interent, telnet has instead been largely replaced by SSH, which offers the same features but blends in security features. Similarly, the original telnet and FTP protocols are no longer appropriate for today's hostile Internet, because they don't provide any protection against eavesdropping (called "packet sniffing"), particularly of identification credentials used to log into remote computers. The three core "application-level" protocols before the world wide web were 1) telnet (for using remote computers), 2) FTP (file transfer protocol, for moving files between computers), and 3) SMTP (for sending mail - receiving mail has always used a variety of different protocols).įor the past several years SMTP has been undergoing forced evolution as ground zero in the war between spammers on one side and ISPs, anti-spam developers, and users on the other. As it has become hugely popular and evolved into a critical resource for banking and electronic shopping, the original Internet communications protocols underwent severe strains. ![]() The Internet was originally developed as a US research project, restricted to academics and the military.
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