Computer Awareness Quiz: Cyber Security and Threats

Phishing sends a message that looks as if it came from a bank, an employer or a government office, and asks the reader to confirm a password, a card number or a one-time password on a page that belongs to the attacker; the target of the attack is the person…

A firewall sits between a trusted internal network and the untrusted world outside, inspects the traffic crossing it and permits only what its rules allow, dropping the rest; it may be a hardware appliance, a software program or both together.

A botnet is built by infecting many connected devices, each of which becomes a zombie obeying a single controller; the network so assembled is then rented out or used for spam, fraud or a flood of traffic.

The correct answer is D, all of the above, because cyber security is not one activity but a programme that covers all three.

The triad names the three goals of information security: confidentiality, that only authorised people can read the data; integrity, that the data is complete and unaltered from the moment it was created or sent; and availability, that the system works when an authorised user needs it.

A worm carries its own code, finds other machines through the network and copies itself to them without any help from the user, which is why worms can spread across the world in hours.

It locks the files by encrypting them and shows a demand for money, usually in a crypto currency, in exchange for the key; the WannaCry outbreak of 2017 struck hospitals, factories and offices in many countries and is the example examiners quote.

The correct answer is B, CERT-In, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, which works under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and is the national agency for collecting, analysing and issuing alerts on cyber incidents and for coordinating the response to them.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and it is the distorted text, image grid or check box that a site shows before accepting a form, so that automated programs cannot register accounts, book tickets in bulk or guess passwords by the thousand.

The name counts the days the software maker has had to fix the flaw, and that number is zero: the attacker knows of a weakness that the vendor has not discovered or not yet repaired, so no update protects the user and even a fully patched system is exposed.

Anyone may hold the public key and use it to encrypt a message, but only the holder of the matching private key can decrypt it, so no secret has to be exchanged in advance; RSA is the standard example, and the same pair used the other way round produces a…

It is the helpline on which a victim of online financial fraud should call at once, because a report made within the first hours lets banks and payment operators freeze the money before it is withdrawn; complaints can also be filed on the national cybercrime reporting portal.