At some point a youth that is getting into using the internet completely, they sometimes start looking at features or pieces of it that are unsavory or end up where there are a lot of nasty ads or worse.
This post is to help identify and teach about more facets of the internet that are sometimes overlooked.
What are some bad things on the internet?
Below are some answers from an 11 year old...
- viruses
- pornography
- bad words
- horror/scary stuff
Gauging existing knowledge on a subject to see what needs more info is important. Building out a graph on paper or a graph or powerpoint may be helpful. Below are topics that I built out while discussing "bad" things on the internet.
- spyware
- adware
- randsomware
- P.U.P.s - potentially unwanted programs
- viruses
- trojans
- root kits
- worms
- keyloggers
Generally viruses are made to
- damage/destroy
- steal stuff
- threaten
- terrorism
- drug sales with bitcoin wallets
- illegal markets
- forums soliciting for illegal services
- lots-o-viruses and bad ads
Tor is a kind of browser based on peer to peer technologies that mask internet traffic by spawning it randoming from a collection of Tor nodes. With the quantity of Tor nodes it gives anonimity to those using the Tor browser.
Some sites are only accessible through Tor, like zlib.
Internet Relay Chat
mIRC
lots of bots, kind of like a command line interface for some services
several bots are in a cyclical conversation with themselves, almost like the simulated subreddits that are just bots talking to bots
- AOL Instant Messenger, AIM
- MSN messenger
- Google chat
- Yahoo Instant Messenger
- Trillian
- Pidgeon
- Google Hangouts
- TeamSpeek
- HipChat
- Discord
- Slack
- LineChat
- Microsoft Teams
- Syncthing
- Bittorrent
- Magnet links
- Seeds, seeders
- Downloads, lurkers, leechers
- clients
- muTorrent
- qbitTorrent
- Transmission
- PirateBay
- PopcornTime
- SciHub (sort of)
Frequently used to share or send media.
Movies, books, music, video games, software, ROMs
"cracked"
Bypassing DRM and server.
The basic principle is instead of sending data to a dedicated server to get files instead you send files to another peer computer that has the files available.
Loosely similar to FTP and SFTP and rsync.
Most internet services work by a computer listening on a port.
When inside a router, you don't have a port exposed to the internet to listen on. If your router has a public IP from the modem, you can tell the router to listen on a port and forward any packets coming to that port onto a computer inside the network. This is useful for hosting websites or hosting a gaming server, like a Minecraft server, inside your home network.
In DDWRT (a type of modem firmware) it shows up under "NAT / QoS > Port Forwarding".
To get to this page you usually have to edit the router settings.
To find where the router is on the network, it is usually the Gateway listed in your ipconfig
Something like 192.168.1.0 or 10.10.0.0 or one of the other "local" special ip address prefixes with a low numbers on the end.
You usually need an admin password to get on and change any settings for your device.
If you want to host a game server without any restrictions of who is hosting it where, you can set up some servers to make this easier. As long as those servers are running a remote person can connect with relatively low latency to a game hosted somewhere else, like a VPN without needing a VPN.
This kind of came out of Skype and Google Meet and other streaming video services. Most of the time they can directly connect to the strongest computer hosting but sometimes a 3rd party host is required for a good streaming experience for everyone involved.
When you are interested in a website like "example.com", your computer has to find the address for that computer.
It askes the ISP (internet service provider) to look up the domain name mapping to an IP address using a DNS (domain name service).
The company or individual hosting the website advertises its domain name using something called a Nameserver.
An IPv4 contains 32 bits of information broken into groups of 8.
11111111.11111111.11111111.11111111
2^8 2^8 2^8 2^8
256 256 256 256
0-255 0-255 0-255 0-255
Now you can have an address that looks like 1.2.3.4
Some common DNS servers are google's: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 so you can get domain names from them instead of your ISP if you want.
Old school modems made lots of beeping noises and went over a phone line.
At 56K bits per second.
Then DSL got faster (still over phone lines)
Then Cable got faster (now over coax)
Then Fiber lines were installed (now over fiberglass lines)
The modem delivers access to the house.
The router makes wifi signals that go to the modems. Some ISPs provide a combo box.
Routers typically have a firewall. What is the origin of the word firewall? Apartments and cars have a separation from one area to another that is mostly fire proof.
The modem exposes an IP address for the house. The router knows the last hop for which computer either requested the IP address or exposes a service out to the internet, aka listens on a port.
Many kinds of games and services are not exposed over the general internet. They are only available to other computers inside the "Router" or inside the "LAN" aka Local Area Network.
For these kinds of limited network services, you need to show up inside the network to access it.
But what if you are far away and still want to be a part of that private network?
You use some psuedo network adapters like OpenVPN or Citrix and now your computer can see the resources inside the private network, virtually.
And you have a virtual private network, VPN.
TightVNC is one of the popular free flavors of this.
RDP is similar.
In the end you get remote access to another computer.
- TeamViewer
- RustDesk
- AnyDesk
All do something similar. Be careful giving access to your computer or another remotely. You could be getting "socially engineered".
A lot of video calling services include some sort of screen sharing as well that can act like a VNC or RDP kind of service for short periods while on the call.
Instead of calling over a phone jack or over cellular, why not use WiFi and the internet? This works well as long as you aren't hopping networks too much. Driving away from your house tends to cause a disconnect from the Wifi and the call drops briefly before reconnecting over cellular.
Access to some public internet pieces are blocked by your location "geo-fencing" or "geoip", or by the country you are coming from or your ISP or some other information. Some services only allow a free trial or one account per household.
To bypass these restrictions you want your source ip address to appear to come from somewhere else.
Another reason for a proxy is if you want to mask your internet traffic from your ISP or from your Government. If your internet traffic now goes through some remote computer instead of sourcing from your computer, you can do searches without as much worry of it coming back to you and your house.
So you get a proxy, you can pretend to come from another country or location.
Now when running a proxy or accessing the internet from a proxy you now appear to come from somewhere else.
The cloud is rentable computers living in data centers. Big boxy buildings with server racks drawing a lot of electricity and cooling.
AWS is famous for it and got into the business because of Black Friday. They needed their website to run quickly on a super heavy traffic day like Black Friday. So they buy extra hardware for running on Black Friday and all the other days of the year, they need like 1% of that hardware to run efficiently.
They started renting out their extra hardware and made a business out of it.
And thus Cloud Computing was born.
A gamer gets mad at another gamer at the end of a round of a FPS.
One gamer has a weak password, or the list of users on the game and their account info is in a compromised database.
The mad gamer hacks in, by guessing the weak password, or has access to account info in the database.
He looks at the Credit Card address information, and now has Name, Phone and Address of the other gamer.
The mad gamer fakes a call to 911 as if he is calling from the house of the victim. He says enough to authorize extreme force without questions at the house, like "Help, my uncle at the house just killed my dad with a weapon and is threatening to kill my mom; send help now!"
The cops send over an armed unit, "SWAT" team, they bust down the door and arrest any older male in the building.
Someone downloads and runs a bad program that waits in the background and then when the computer is idle, it starts encrypting files on the disk in place. The program encrypts as many personal files as possible and then leaves a randsom note in a readme in the folders: "If you want your files back, send x amount of money to this bitcoin wallet, then I will send you the program to decrypt your files". Police and FBI won't do anything about your files. Undoing the encryption takes years of research or more. Or 1000's of years of CPU power to decrypt.
When the twin towers fell in 9/11/2001, there were some extreme pushes to decrypt and help with password recovery for people that died in those buildings.
The book Digital Fortress by Michael Criton goes into some of these concepts in a SciFi sort of way.
If I have enough personal information about you, I can pretend to be you to a bank or to a credit card company or to a store.
If I get access to amazon or ebay as you, I can update your delivery address and then buy a bunch of things under your name and ship them to me. I get free stuff and you get a big credit card bill.
If I write an email and pretend to be another entity, like I pretend to be your bank or a government service, then I may be able to get your password or account details from a bogus link in the email.
If I send you enough ads to your email, you might read and click on a link to buy something. So I'll send you so much email from random email addresses you will read some of it eventually, right?
Its a reference to SPAM, a canned pork meat that was popular during WWII as fresh meat because scarce.
If I propose a business opportunity or a get rich quick opportunity that sounds too good to be true, that is normally a "scam". There are sites like Snoopes that tries to discuss what is a scam and what is not.
More often this is targetted at poor, or low intelligent people. Or people that are gullible and haven't been burned before, like some elderly people.
The scams often are around some large money transfer from a foreign country to the US that they just need help with a few fees and then you get a large cut of the final money transfer after it completes.
Or it has to do with a grandchild or niece or nephew that needs bail money to get out of a foreign jail.
Bitcoin mining is guessing transaction sha values that when sha'ed again with a batch of 10 minutes of transaction data, it gives a valid sha that has some special prefix, such as 100 zeros at the front of the sha. It requires a lot of CPU or GPU or some ASICs to do it efficiently.
So some websites run a javascript miner in the background, and use electricity in the background on your machine and send successful guesses to the owner of the miner.
Some viruses install a miner that runs in the background that does the intensive number crunching and your electricity bill goes up and the owner of the minor gets some hits back of successful sha's that they can turn into money.
This is a combo of con artist work and a gullible person at the end of an email, or messenging program or end of a phonecall or even on your door step.
They convince you that they desperately need something urgently, and you fall for their fake need one way or another.
Once you give them what they want, whether it is money, credentials, or valuables, they almost certainly will ghost and disappear or give you inaccurate ways to contact them.