Computer Security - What Exactly Is It?

Even though the term'computer security' is used a lot, the content of a computer is actually vulnerable to only a few risks unless the computer is connected to others on a network. As the use of computer networks (especially the Internet) has increased dramatically during the last few decades, the term computer security is now used to describe issues referring to the networked use of computers and their resources.

The major technical areas of computer security are confidentiality, integrity and authentication/availability.

- Confidentiality, also known as secrecy or privacy, means that the info that you own can't be accessed by unauthorized parties. Breaches of confidentiality range from the embarrassing to the catastrophic.

- Integrity means your data is protected against unauthorized changes that are imperceptible to authorized users. The integrity of databases and other resources are often compromised through hacking.

- Authentication means that an user is who he claims to be.

- accessibility means that the resources are accessible by authorized parties. Examples of accessibility attacks would be the'denial of service' attacks.

Other important things that the computer security professionals are worried about are access control and nonrepudiation. Access control refer not just to how users can only access the services and resources they're eligible for, but also to how they can not be denied to access the resources they legitimately expect. Nonrepudiation means that someone who sends a message can't deny that he sent it and vice versa.

In addition to these technical aspects, the idea of computer security is extremely large. Computer security's roots are drawn from disciplines like ethics and risk analysis and the significant topics which are about it are computer crime (attempts to prevent, detect and remedy attacks) and identity/anonymity in cyberspace.

Although confidentiality, integrity and authenticity are the most important things when it comes to computer security in general, for everyday internet users, privacy is the most important one, because most individuals think they have nothing to hide or the information they give does not appear sensitive when they register with an online service/site.

But bear in mind that, on the world wide web, information is quite easily shared among businesses and tiny pieces of related information from different sources can be connected together to form something far more complex about someone. Due to this, nowadays, the ability to keep control over what information is collected about them, who may use it and how it can be used is vitally important.