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.

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