Topic > Protect yourself online - 1685

With the help of the Internet, our personal information is everywhere. Our banking and financial information is online, along with our medical records and social media profiles. Privacy is becoming a bigger issue now that we share our personal information for more things, more frequently. “Protect Yourself Online” by Matthew Danda is a great starting point for learning how to be a more informed user of the Internet and how to be more aware of our personal information. The book is structured in four parts: Part 1 discusses the fundamentals of Internet security and privacy, Part 2 specializes in privacy on the World Wide Web, the topics of Part 3 are email security and privacy, and Part 4 discusses the ways in which to protect a computer. Following the structure of the book, I will review and summarize the most important aspects of the parts and chapters in chronological order. Part 1 presents chapters one through five. Chapter 1 is titled “Start Your Online Journey” and Danda introduces the reader to the idea that there are threats on the Internet that could happen to them. Explain that threats can affect a person's computer, property, or personal safety. It also highlights the fact that some threats can go unnoticed. Danda uses this opening chapter to shed light on ideas that readers may not have considered. In Chapter 2, Danda describes the basics of the Internet. He claims that security threats are the result of the design of the Internet. The Internet was used exclusively by the military until 1995, when it was made public (Danda 23). The most popular services on the Internet are email and the World Wide Web (Danda 23). Each computer is assigned an IP address, and no two IP addresses are the same. Computers send information over the Internet by breaking the information into packets and sending the packets separately (Danda