Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Security and Protective Software
The arrival of hacking, viruses, worms, and denial of service attacks created a crit-
ical new subindustry of companies that develop and market antivirus tools, fire-
walls, and other kinds of protective software. There is a heated technical race go-
ing on between cybercriminals and cyberdefenders.
Major threats include viruses, worms, spyware, botnets, denial of service at-
tacks, identity theft, and many others.
Major defensive products include firewalls and over a dozen malware and an-
tivirus tools such as AVG, Avira, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft Se-
curity, Norton, and many more.
Social Network Software
Social networks have millions of members in essentially every country in the
world. The most common social networks today are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
and the older America Online (AOL). Not exactly social networks per se but hav-
ing a similar impact on daily lives are craigslist and Angie's List, used by millions
of consumers to find products and reviews of services. Wiki sites are another new
form of social network, which has led to
crowdsourcing
, which is when disparate
groups of people can address some fairly complex issues in one place on the web.
Social networks derived from earlier technologies such as bulletin boards and
email. They gradually added features such as instant chatting, images, photo-
graphs, and other newer features such as audio.
More than 100 major social networks appear on the web and probably one
or two new ones spring up every month. YouTube, MySpace, SecondLife, and
Friendster are other examples of social networks. Massively multiplayer computer
games are not pure social networks, but they overlap that field because the players
are in contact with one another.
Facebook is the largest with 200 million subscribers. However, dozens of social
networks each have more than 10 million subscribers.
Social networking is a phenomenon that started less than 30 years ago, but the
combined memberships of all social networks is probably equal to perhaps one
seventh of the global population.
Users of social networks vary by age, occupation, and other variables. School-
children through college levels are intense users of social networks. People under
the age of 25 typically are members of several social networks and use them daily.
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