Information Technologies for Diplomatic Activities by Stefano Baldi

General Questions

Can I trust information provided ?

• Fake information
• Updated information
• Reliability of the service
• Security issues - Tips

Fake information

• Hoaxes
  

  One of the biggest problems is the spreading of false emails. A malicious person creates an email that is untrue and sends it out to many friends. These friends forward the email to other friends. The cycle continues on and on.

  How can you spot a hoax?

  1) Carefully read the description of the e-mail message. Many times you will be able to spot false information.

  2) Examine the author of the virus warning and check whether the message is from a reputable source.

  3) Check with virus web sites on the Internet

  
  » See document: http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
   
• Frauds
  » See document: http://fraud.org/welcome.htm
   

Updated information

Many pages on the web keep changing because of the dynamic nature of the Internet. It is always good to check when the page has been last updated, in particular when you are going to use the information you have retrieved.

Sometime pages disappear, therefore you get messages like: 404 Not Found error was encountered. In that case you should first of all check any mispelling, then try to erase the last part of the URL (e.g. the name of the file or the last subdirectory) and try again, until you get a page.

Reliability of the service

Security issues - Tips

» See document: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_smgraph_display/0,3441,2127516,00.html

• Types of incident
  

  Incidents can be broadly classified into several kinds: the probe, scan, account compromise, root compromise, packet sniffer, denial of service, exploitation of trust, malicious code, and Internet infrastructure attacks.

  
  » See document: http://www.cert.org/encyc_article/tocencyc.html#NetSecInc