Phishing by Shrivaths S Nair, IX

 

Phishing is a way that criminals get sensitive information (like usernames or passwords). Phishing is carried out mostly by email where you will get an email stating something like you have won a lottery or scholarship or the mail may appear to come from a bank or reputed company. The mail will ask you to visit the given link and to provide your personal information. The websites will look similar to a legitimate company that people believe them to be real and provide the information.

Mostly phishing is done to get the bank details of individuals. It is also used for identity theft.

How to Identify a Phishing mail?

You can identify these type of mails by properly going through the content. They will have spelling and grammatical errors. Any communication from a reputed company will have a good language. These mails often urge you take immediate action, without giving time to think. Always think how you won a scholarship or lottery without applying for it. The mail may inform you that your mail account/bank account is exploited, it is under threat or may be it will be terminated if you don't take quick action etc. Do not fall prey to such tricks.

Also you can look at the email id from which the mail originated. The mail id will not have the proper domain name of the company it claims to be.

How to Safe Guard?

Never provide your personal information or passwords through email

Do not click on the links that looks suspicious

Check the fact checking website to find whether the warning is real

If a mail is suspected as phishing, do not open it, mark it as spam

Always be careful while you are typing the URL of a website - a typo may lead you to a phishing site

Check for malwares that change your default search engine to something eles

Do not download mail attachments without verifying the authenticity

Make sure that the address use a secure connection (https://) for your email accounts, banking transatcitons, e-commerce etc. Look for the green color indicator for the secure site in the address bar.

Hacking by Gauri, VIII D

 

Hacking is unauthorized access to a computer or a network. A hacker is a person who is competent in computer operating systems and netwoks who can exploit the vulnerabilities in a computer system or network to get in to it and make changes. Normally, anyone who attacks a computer or a network is called a hacker.

Hackers usually target computers connected to the internet. They can break the computer security and can cause damage to the computer and steal your personal information.

A person doing something illegal with a computer belonging to someone else without asking a permission of the owner is also called a hacker.

The computer hackers are generally categorised into three

• White hat hackers
• Black hat hackers
• Grey hat hackers

These categories are based on the motivation of the hacker and whether they are breaking the law.

White Hat Hackers

They are also known as "ethical hackers". White hat hackers are specialists who work as security specialists for companies -they may be an employee or may be doing freelance work.

White hat hackers are also experts like the black hat and use the same technology and tools to achieve it. The exception is they do it with the permission of the owners and they do it for good purposes like to find out the vulnerabilities of the system. It is highly paid job and there are many courses to learn ethical hacking.

You may find many tutorials on hacking online, but if you are trying to learn hacking remember it is illegal to do so on some one else's computer/networks without their consent.

Grey Hat Hackers

Grey hat hackers are a blend of both blak hat and white hat hackers. What they do is they hack in to systems/networks without the owners permission looking for vulnerabilities in it. If they find any issues they will report the same to the owner and may charge a fee for reporting or even fixing the issue. 

Though they may not have malicious intention and may not exploit the vulnerabilities they find, this is also illegal as they are doing it without the knowledge or permission of the owner(s) of the system.

Black Hat Hackers

They are the bad ones. Their objective is personal or financial gain. Black hat hackers are involved in cyber espionage (spying) and commit cyber crimes. Some of the do it just for the fun on achieving the taks, others steal vital personal data like your login credentials. At the higher levels they steal the security informations of a country, destruct the computer networks, birng down the services of a website 

Computer Safety Tips by Vishal Krishnan, IX B

Cyber Bullying a presentation by Hiranmayi

 

Fake News by Aadithyajaan, Class VIII

 

Sometimes, we get some stories, news or photographs through social media which may sound too good to be true. As the number of fake news and misinformation spreading through the social media and internet it is important to identify such fake news and to avoid them.

How can we identify fake news?

If a news item is true it will have the information of the news media that made it. If it does not have any information to identify the source of the news, it may be fake.

If the news is true, that will be reported on the newspapers and news channels too. Did you find any news on this item in question?

Is it a positive news or is something that have a harmful intent? If the news is something that speaks bad of something or someone avoid it.

Also you may find most of the fake news stories, use all capital letters or most letters in capitals. You may also find spelling and grammatical errors.

Whether true or false, don't spread hate speeches, violent videos and other such content to anyone. When you get something like that just delete it.

Try this Fake News game

You can visit the following sites to check for facts

Snopes

Google Fact Check Tools

Hoax Slayer

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