AnIdenticon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of an IP address, that serves to identify a user of a computer system as a form of avatar while protecting the user's privacy. The original Identicon was a 9-block graphic, and the representation has been extended to other graphic forms by third parties.
Don Park came up with the Identicon idea on January 18, 2007. In his words:
I originally came up with this idea to be used as an easy means of visually distinguishing multiple units of information, anything that can be reduced to bits. It's not just IPs but also people, places, and things. IMHO, too much of the web what we read are textual or numeric information which are not easy to distinguish at a glance when they are jumbled up together. So I think adding visual identifiers will make the user experience much more enjoyable. [1]
A similar method had previously been described by Adrian Perrig and Dawn Song in their 1999 publication on hash visualization, [2] which had already seen wide use such as in the random art of SSH keys.
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
Phishing is a form of social engineering and scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror the site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim is navigating the site, and transverse any additional security boundaries with the victim. As of 2020, it is the most common type of cybercrime, with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more incidents of phishing than any other type of computer crime.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method which ensures the sending mail server is authorized to originate mail from the email sender's domain. This authentication only applies to the email sender listed in the "envelope from" field during the initial SMTP connection. If the email is bounced, a message is sent to this address, and for downstream transmission it typically appears in the "Return-Path" header. To authenticate the email address which is actually visible to recipients on the "From:" line, other technologies such as DMARC must be used. Forgery of this address is known as email spoofing, and is often used in phishing and email spam.
Internet security is a branch of computer security. It encompasses the Internet, browser security, web site security, and network security as it applies to other applications or operating systems as a whole. Its objective is to establish rules and measures to use against attacks over the Internet. The Internet is an inherently insecure channel for information exchange, with high risk of intrusion or fraud, such as phishing, online viruses, trojans, ransomware and worms.
Email authentication, or validation, is a collection of techniques aimed at providing verifiable information about the origin of email messages by validating the domain ownership of any message transfer agents (MTA) who participated in transferring and possibly modifying a message.
IP traceback is any method for reliably determining the origin of a packet on the Internet. The IP protocol does not provide for the authentication of the source IP address of an IP packet, enabling the source address to be falsified in a strategy called IP address spoofing, and creating potential internet security and stability problems.
Gravatar is a service for providing globally unique avatars and was created by Tom Preston-Werner. Since 2007, it has been owned by Automattic, having integrated it into their WordPress.com blogging platform.
A spoofed URL involves one website masquerading as another, often leveraging vulnerabilities in web browser technology to facilitate a malicious computer attack. These attacks are particularly effective against computers that lack up-to- security patches. Alternatively, some spoofed URLs are crafted for satirical purposes.
Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed, but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.
In computing, a blacklist, disallowlist, blocklist, or denylist is a basic access control mechanism that allows through all elements, except those explicitly mentioned. Those items on the list are denied access. The opposite is a whitelist, allowlist, or passlist, in which only items on the list are let through whatever gate is being used. A greylist contains items that are temporarily blocked until an additional step is performed.
Distinguishable interfaces use computer graphic principles to automatically generate easily distinguishable appearance for computer data.
Trust on first use (TOFU), or trust upon first use (TUFU), is an authentication scheme used by client software which needs to establish a trust relationship with an unknown or not-yet-trusted endpoint. In a TOFU model, the client will try to look up the endpoint's identifier, usually either the public identity key of the endpoint, or the fingerprint of said identity key, in its local trust database. If no identifier exists yet for the endpoint, the client software will either prompt the user to confirm they have verified the purported identifier is authentic, or if manual verification is not assumed to be possible in the protocol, the client will simply trust the identifier which was given and record the trust relationship into its trust database. If in a subsequent connection a different identifier is received from the opposing endpoint, the client software will consider it to be untrusted.
Retroshare is a free and open-source peer-to-peer communication and file sharing app based on a friend-to-friend network built by GNU Privacy Guard (GPG). Optionally peers may exchange certificates and IP addresses to their friends and vice versa.
Spam reporting, more properly called abuse reporting, is the action of designating electronic messages as abusive for reporting to an authority so that they can be dealt with. Reported messages can be email messages, blog comments, or any kind of spam.
SmartScreen is a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware component included in several Microsoft products, including operating systems Windows 8 and later, the applications Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge. SmartScreen intelligence is also used in the backend of Microsoft's online services such as the web app Outlook.com and Microsoft Bing search engine.
Google Safe Browsing is a service from Google that warns users when they attempt to navigate to a dangerous website or download dangerous files. Safe Browsing also notifies webmasters when their websites are compromised by malicious actors and helps them diagnose and resolve the problem. This protection works across Google products and is claimed to “power safer browsing experiences across the Internet”. It lists URLs for web resources that contain malware or phishing content. Browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, and GNOME Web use these lists from Google Safe Browsing to check pages against potential threats. Google also provides a public API for the service.
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting IPFS hosts.
ZeroNet is a decentralized web-like network of peer-to-peer users, created by Tamas Kocsis in 2015, programming for the network was based in Budapest, Hungary; is built in Python; and is fully open source. Instead of having an IP address, sites are identified by a public key. The private key allows the owner of a site to sign and publish changes, which propagate through the network. Sites can be accessed through an ordinary web browser when using the ZeroNet application, which acts as a local webhost for such pages. In addition to using bitcoin cryptography, ZeroNet uses trackers from the BitTorrent network to negotiate connections between peers. ZeroNet is not anonymous by default, but it supports routing traffic through the Tor network.
Internet security awareness or Cyber security awareness refers to how much end-users know about the cyber security threats their networks face, the risks they introduce and mitigating security best practices to guide their behavior. End users are considered the weakest link and the primary vulnerability within a network. Since end-users are a major vulnerability, technical means to improve security are not enough. Organizations could also seek to reduce the risk of the human element. This could be accomplished by providing security best practice guidance for end users' awareness of cyber security. Employees could be taught about common threats and how to avoid or mitigate them.
ShinyHunters is a criminal black-hat hacker group that is believed to have formed in 2020 and is said to have been involved in numerous data breaches. The stolen information is often sold on the dark web.
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