Para pensar: "Internet is a dangerous place though."

I spend a lot of time on Internet, mainly on IRC and Windows Live Messenger. On the days I don’t work I can spend over 10 hours at it. I like a lot to be “close” to my Internet friends all around the world and chat with them.

During the years, my number of contacts/friends around the world has increased a lot. Thanks to Internet it happened even faster than before and, now-a-days, I have many friends some of which in important positions.

I also enjoy a lot searching for updates of all the software I like or use and I always try to be up-to-date with the software, hardware and news relating both and also relating other subjects.

Internet is a dangerous place though. When I was a newbie and I still used an old dial-up modem, I was nuked several times by evil persons and also got infected with trojans sent to me by persons from IRC claiming to be films or other things. Some people also tried to impersonate me on several occasions. I had to learn the hard way that there were evil people out there wanting to ruin the life of others.

I have been disappointed with IRC since it no longer is what it used to be. Now-a-days most people have broad band connections and are connected 24 hours a day and just idle there. The IRC channels seem ghost rooms. No one talks and only lamers are active saying or doing stupid things... it is really annoying.

In more recent years I learned about spyware, adware, malware, spam and phishing. This after having problems with them. The more time going by, the more unsafe I started feeling about Internet. Internet is indeed a dangerous place since almost everyone can have access to it which means all kind of persons get in and try to hurt and take advantage of other persons.

Spam is generated in several ways. There are Webcrawlers which are programs that search the Internet for email addresses and generate a list with them which is used by spammers. Also, people infected with spyware will make the malicious programs to send spam to the persons in the address book of the mail program or in the pages visited by the infected people. Also, chain letters which are forwarded with the emails of the persons who send it on the body or the whole destination email addresses in the "TO:", will end up in someone along the way who will collect the emails and later spam. Some malicious programs even log everything one types and send the logs to criminals.

Phishing is an attempt by criminals to try to get personal information about you (like real name, credit card numbers, addresses, usernames and passwords) which can be used later for fraudulent purposes like identity theft. This is achieved through emails pretending to be from real companies, websites, financial institutions, etc. but they link to other sites owned by the scammers. Some of the sites may even infect your computer with viruses and alike.

There are also criminals out there waiting for known domains to expire so that they can register them, and add adverts or other bad things to the domains. I have noticed this happening with lots of sites which used to belong to friends of mine in the past.

Marco Pinto