Cyber-attacks are a major problem to businesses as well as home users, it is in every nook, and cranny in the world of computers and prevention is a major concern to all. Many websites have contracted viruses or denial of service attacks and some host malware. Unsuspecting visitors visit these sites and contracted the spyware, malware, or viruses to their own home computer. What can we do for this? Well, there are preventive measures that one can take companies or home users. To find preventive measures the user must first understand the hacker and how they work.
The vulnerabilities of one’s network are those call weaknesses or holes, hackers love these and can scan a system for days trying to find them. It is the administrator or IT department to find these such holes and find a way to abolish them before they are inundated with the chaos the hackers bring forth. Agreeing with “HackingAlert” the prevention is more difficult and complex in real life (HackingAlert). A large threat and a near fatal threat is the malware, it is used to capture vital information from the user’s computer, such as logins and passwords. This type of information is used in high-risk areas such as banking information. It can be well hidden in applications like a PowerPoint presentation, email, instant messenger, or a Web Site may have it hidden or embedded in the site itself.
This paper will discuss these measures in hopes to educate the user in open-minded scenarios. First thing to know is that there is no absolute way to prevent hackers on a 100% basis. If there is a full proof system there will always be a hacker out there trying to break in. That is why it is important to be ferocious in keeping the systems safe from these hackers and prevent the intrusion in the first place. Big companies like NASA to Wal-mart have been victims of hackers, so no one person or company is safe from these hackers.
Some of the preventive measures call for Operating System updates, to keep them current, some say not to but it is a better idea to update your Operating system. Web browsers are another application that hackers are trying to penetrate so update these also. Unfortunately personally have found that some updates for the Web browsers can also be a problem, things just don’t work after an update then the user is stuck between a rock and a hard place. So keeping that in mind it is a personal preference on that matter.
Firewalls are a down right necessity for any computer and network. It determines what is coming through and going out, port scanning, and verifying these domains can help determine what is good and a “go ahead” or a blocking of IP address. A personal preference is Kaspersky Pure, an Internet security application or software that has a firewall, anti-virus, and network monitoring system.
Anti-Spyware, Adware, and Malware programs can help and aide where others may fail to detect. I have had no problems with Kaspersky but it isn’t the best at finding some of the malware all the time. Malwarebytes, an application that scans for malware and spyware is also a good preventive measure for any system. Now it is not good to have more than one anti-virus on one system but to combine Malwarebytes and Kaspersky seems to do the trick when scanning new files or looking for discrepancies in the files a user has on their system.
According to Tony M. Damico of studentpulse.com attacks can be used as a way to gain access to a user’s computer for army bots that is to create a way to infiltrate a system to carry on the code to other computers in a number of ways as an automatic infiltration act. A hacker can hack for storage for keeping copyrighted material on the users system illegally (studentpulse).
So in order to keep the attack prevention in order one must take the preventive measures to keep the system and network safe. Taking the steps mentioned in this paper will help keep the computer and network under lock and key but always remember as new applications and updates are available there is always an attacker waiting in the curtains to spoof a system for new ways to infiltrate the unsuspecting user.

References
Damico, T. M. (2009) Cyber Attack Prevention for the Home User: How to Prevent a Cyber Attack, Retrieved September 12, 2012 from http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/47/cyber-attack-prevention-for-the-home-user- how-to-prevent-a-cyber-attack
Hacking Alert (n.d.) Hacker-Tricks Retrieved September 11, 2012 from http://www.hackingalert.com/hacking-articles/hacker-tricks.php
Kaspersky (n.d.) Retrieved September 11, 2012 from http://kaspersky.com
Malwarebytes (n.d.) Retrieved September 11, 2012 from http://malwarebytes.com