TeamAltman :: Cybercrime and Tips to Protect Business and Home Computers

So much is happening in the world of Cyber Crime and non-technical people accessing the web may not realize the dangers that exist. Each time you accept any type of data from someone via an email or software download can open your computer to the world of “cyber crime”. This is scary considering the amount of spam that I see in my email inbox or all the free types of software downloads on the web. There are a few resources that are worth checking out, plus there are simple things that we can do to protect ourselves and our data. What is Cyber Crime? Take a look at this Wikipedia Article for more details. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercrime [1]

The first thing that I would look at is the http://www.fbi.gov/cyberinvest/cyberhome.htm [2] website. This website was created by the FBI to help out citizens seeking additional information on cyber crime, potential risks, and things you can do if you feel that you are a victim. There is a whole section on Protecting one’s self located on the right side of the page. I found the information to be very valuable and worth taking a moment to research and see what is listed. Take a look at this youtube video that addresses someone committing a cyber crime and how they were caught. It is very interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHmFiueQm5A [3]

Recently on Yahoo News, March 2, 2010, 3 suspects have been caught for one of the largest network of virus attacks called a “botnet”. The virus was on nearly 13 million machines that stole credit cards and banking information. Botnets, according to Yahoo, “are networks of infected PCs that have been hijacked from their owners.” [4] The most impressive part of this whole operation was the fact that the people involved were not your typical computer nerds or “Hackers”. They actually were not really well versed in computers, no criminal record, and received helped from others to create this botnet. You never can tell who is behind these cyber crimes.

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When we look at the world of the top search engines, it can be divided into Crawler-based, Human-powered, Hybrid, and Pay-per-performance search engines. Crawler-based or “traditional” utilize special software, and surf the Web to supplement their database. Search engine spiders scan parameters which are not visible to the human eye, and they don’t differentiate the amenities of design, but see only the code for images, which throws obstacles between it and your content. The most important data for search engine robots is the relevancy of your printed text, the frequency of your keywords and phrases in the contents of the page, especially at the beginning and the end of it, which should be emphasized. The top search engines of “traditional” kind are Google, Teoma, AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, and Hotbot.

Directories, which are also known as human-powered or edited search engines, do not look for websites to index them, but they rather prefer you take the action to suggest your site, and most of them have “Add URL” pages where you fill out the required information such as the website title, description, keywords, and email. You simply select the proper category for the website and then, in accordance of turn, it will be examined by human editors, leaving the decision of this editor only to accept or not to accept the site. So it is that human-powered search engines do not have their own algorithms to rank websites, they rank according to alphabetic sequence or Google Page Rank, and Directories are often used by top search engines as a source of new pages to scan for indexation, and finally, among the largest top search engines of human-edited nature there are Yahoo!, DMOZ, and Looksmart.

Hybrid Search engines utilize both types of listing, for example, MSN presents human-edited listings from Looksmart and crawler-based listings from its own Web crawler. Currently, some top search engines also resort to opposite listings such as Google and Yahoo, but it only takes a small part of the whole process, and they are still leading their classes. Also, there are meta-search engines, which work to combine the results from the number of other top search engines at the same time and present the results, and among this kind of search engines is MetaCrawler and Dogpile, for example, MetaCrawler compiles the results of seven search engines including AltaVista and Lycos.

In Pay-per-performance search engines, you pay for your site to be listed, re-spidered, and top-ranked according to keywords you both choose and bid on. It is important to note that there is not a big amount of sites focused only on paid inclusions, with the most prominent being Overture, and in addition you can find some additional paid services provided by other top search engines, but don’t feel obligated to use them.

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Before we familiarize ourselves with any search engine, let’s answer the important question, what is a search engine? A search engine is simply complex programs and algorithms that define the most relevant information in the Web and delivers it to the consumer based on their search request of definite keywords or phrases, but we must also understand that the nature of the most popular search engines is quite complex and constantly improving.

Everyone that spends any length of time exploring the Web eventually turns to the search engines for help with information retrieval, and in reality, search engines are the only method by which we find specific websites without knowing its definite web address. Since there are several search engines, it’s a natural decision we all make, that to obtain the most relevant information available, everyone uses only the top search engines they have become the most comfortable with using, and that deliver the most relevant and best results.

As a matter of fact, some search engines deliver much more functionality than just identifying the web pages in the Web that contains words from your search request. If we look closely at Google, it’s carefully designed functionality can be used for a much wider range of purposes including identification of all sites linked to a given site, lookup and retrieval of definitions of technical terms, Internet shopping, and the evaluation of  mathematical expressions and much more.

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