Recently, our IT department detected some student’s personal computer suffered from virus attacks. All students received an email to check if their own computer is on the list of attacked IP address. However, the email was vague about the specific type of virus hazard and how to avoid further damage.
Mr. Shi controls our school’s internet through a device to monitor internet transmission called “Meraki”. This enables him to keep track of all internet activities on our network, and Meraki automatically sends daily reports. Six hazard reports were received on Feb. 1, and a few more arrived in the following days. These reports pinpointed several IP addresses where the computer’s files had been scanned by a virus. Fortunately, it was not severe, and no students lost any files. All the IP addresses belonged to PC computers. Tracking the virus, Mr. Shi discovered that they came from Chinese downloading websites. Some Chinese students must have accidentally downloaded viruses. Mr. Shi reminds us to be careful downloading anything from the internet, since many malicious downloading websites, especially Chinese sites, contain virus links.
Mr. Shi gave some practical advice to students. As previously mentioned, we should never download anything from unofficial sites, but students often need to download software, games, and e-books. The suffix of a file name indicates the type of file. PC users must be extra careful with exe (dmg for MacBook users), zip, or rar files. Exe files are executable programs and have the power to visit your documents and alter the system settings. Before uncompressing compressed files, we should first click them open, and be careful with unfamiliar icons or suffixes as they could be virus. Relatively, the Mac OS system on MacBook is safer than Windows. But it is strongly recommended to install an antivirus program no matter what the system is. 360 Security (http://www.360.cn/) is a good choice for Chinese PC users. Sophos (https://www.sophos.com/) provided many free types of anti-virus software, but it would be much better to purchase professional antivirus programs. Mr. Shi emphasized that whenever we log on to personal accounts on to public computers, we must erase the browser history afterwards. This is an important habit, because our personal username and password are saved in the program files. Hackers can easily extract our password in this way. Common browsers all have a button to erase browsing history.
Dr. Wang, our Computer Science teacher, also shared his own opinion towards the internet safety. Dr. Wang explained that hackers nowadays are “unpredictable”. They can steal our information and record our private life easily, and it is virtually impossible to prevent. He suggested not to use any social media and always “cover the camera on the computer”. Indeed, we rely on social media a lot. However, they could also destroy our privacy.
The Internet is definitely a double-edged sword. It might be useful, or at the same time, harmful. As we are exploring the world of internet, we must be aware of its hazards, both hardware and software. With sufficient knowledge, we can safely enjoy the convenience of internet.