Guidance and Resources

Phishing is persuading people to enter their bank account details or other information which can be used to steal from them or abuse them into a faked official website.

Digital rights management and similar technologies will prevent users from doing things they might consider reasonable (it would be unnecessary otherwise). If this is imposed without reference to users, or is abused by copyright owners or software vendors, a backlash may result.

Spyware is software which covertly transmits a user's personal information from his or her computer to some other destination on the Internet.

Publicity on Internet safety and child pornography arrests may damage confidence in the use of the Internet for other purposes.

Information flowing across the Internet is in most cases visible to anyone with the necessary technical skills and access, including technical staff at ISPs and telcos through which traffic passes. The technology to encrypt (i.e. using codes to conceal) communications on the Internet is reasonably well developed. High-quality email encryption has been freely available for many years. However it is not often used, to the extent that encrypted email would "stand out" to anyone observing traffic flows on the Internet. Most web traffic is not encrypted, although some websites which handle banking and e-commerce use a more secure way of communicating with users which codes the information passing to and fro.

Concerns are sometimes raised about the availability of 'dangerous' information, such as bomb making recipes, on the Internet, and about disinformation or opinion being presented as fact.

Denial of service attacks can effectively shut down web servers and can damage Internet infrastructure. Until recently they have been acts of vandalism, but they are coming to be used for extortion.

This section discusses problems on the Internet - that is, problems which affect people who use the Internet. The problems discussed here are problems of human behaviour. These problems - a better term is 'attacks' - are generated by people who, for a variety of reasons, want to pursue their own agendas on the Internet at a cost to others.

The Internet enables communications between a wider range of individuals than any technology before it. This offers great benefits to people, businesses and governments. However, as the threats in this document show, it also exposes people to risks they do not understand.

There are frequent, serious attacks on the infrastructure of the Internet through the medium of self-replicating code. The potential impact of these is very high. Effects range from trashing individual users' files to abusing users' machines so as to damage Internet infrastructure. These attacks have also disabled non-Internet based systems such as ATM networks. The accompanying publicity potentially affects overall views of the Internet and its usefulness. Perpetrators are seldom traced.