The internet has come to define much of our lives. Whether you like to spend time on your devices or want to overcome this temptation, it’s always necessary to prevent cyberattacks and threats online. It’s paramount to understand the risks, vulnerabilities, and ways to secure your devices, your personal or business data, and network. To do this, you should know about the various cyber attacks and ways to prevent them. Below are five of these online threats you should know about.

Viruses

Starting with the most common, viruses can cause a lot of damage. Like biological viruses, they feed on specific things. They need to feed themselves. However, the viruses today have evolved to become a lot more sophisticated. Whatever the goal of the virus, you should be protecting yourself against these attacks. For example, you should always have a firewall and antivirus installed on your computer. These are the basic protective software that you should have on any computer. Viruses aren’t all the same, but they require you to protect yourself with firewall and antivirus software.

Malware

Malware is any software that aims to harm you, your device, your computer, or your network. When downloaded, malware can disseminate viruses and worms. Worms don’t even have to be noticed. They can silently look for information. Malware can take control of your computer or exploit your information. It can provide passwords and other sensitive information to hackers. To protect against malware, you need anti-malware of course. This software aims to identify and eradicate malware. It must be as dynamic as the attacking software, so you should be sure to get a good anti-malware program on your computer.

Ransomware

Malware can download ransomware on your computer. Ransomware essentially takes control of your device, moves onto other devices, and holds your whole network hostage if it has the chance. This software asks that you pay a ransom to gain back control of your network and its devices. Even if you pay the ransom, there is no telling if the hackers will give you access back or, if they do, the devices could be wiped. Like firewall and antivirus, anti-ransomware is usually coupled with anti-malware, but there are plenty of specialized services out there to help you protect yourself. Staying protected against ransomware is essential. 

Identity Theft

A very common cyber attack is identity theft. The reason it’s so common is that it’s relatively easy to get your hands on someone’s information. They could hack onto your computer, but they don’t even need to do that. If they find out a little about you and you have basic passwords that are easy to guess, they could gain access to an account. Then, if you use the same password they could get into more accounts. 

Once inside these accounts, there is plenty of other information they can gain from it. Identity thieves might open accounts in your name, use your credit card, apply for a new social security number, and perform all kinds of harmful tasks. To protect against identity theft, you should use an encrypted password generator. 

These resources create passwords for you that are both difficult and strong. You won’t have to remember them too if they are stored in an encrypted app. You should also make sure that you don’t click on any unknown links or download attachments that you don’t know. 

Phishing

Lastly, phishing is one of the most common cyberattacks. It is also one of the oldest. Phishing aims to get information from you by tricking you into clicking a link, downloading a file, or providing the information on your own. These attacks have become difficult to identify. They’ve even mastered recreating popular platform documents and images to trick their victims. Phishing attacks can be avoided by showing due diligence more than anything. Always be careful online.

These cyber attacks are just some of the ways that malicious hackers and entities try to harm you. There are others and more are being invented all the time. Basically, if there is a will there's a way. Luckily, you can protect yourself in all kinds of ways, including installing software that will protect you, using encryption, and never clicking on something unknown to you. If you do all these things in tandem, you will be a lot better off when it comes to your overall cybersecurity and online protection.