Assignment +

Literature Review

Computers are becoming more and more common in daily use for a person. The internet is the main attraction to a person is social networking sites, Information pages and emailing. Results show that "In 2010, 30.1 million adults in the UK (60 per cent) accessed the Internet every day or almost every day."(ONS Opinions Survey 27/08/2010)

Figure 1 - Chart of people accessing the internet by year

This means that more people out there are accessing the internet and are possible targets for people to attack. (As shown in figure above)

For this reason there is now many ways for a user to protect themselves from attacks when using the internet; private browsing, email (phishing), anti-virus, spyware/firewall, account management.

When it comes down to private browsing it doesn’t save history and keyed in data, but “many websites encrypt their data for security reasons by automatically establishing a secure key with the user's computer, even if private browsing is enabled. (August 13, 2010 – Collin Jackson). Emailing has phishing emails; replicas of a normal email to obtain your details, “About 28 percent of the time, the consumers incorrectly identify the phishing messages as legitimate.” (28/7/2004 – Bob Sullivan). The most common known protection is anti-virus, but even this can be ineffective when you find you have a fake version, fake anti-virus "represents 15 percent of all malware that Google detects on web sites" (Google - 27/4/2010) supported by the "240 million Web pages and more than 11,000 domains involved in fake anti-virus distribution uncovered” (Elinor Mills – 2010)

http://www.trojan-horse.info/en/antivirus.aspx

Research Methodology

There are two main types of research methods; Primary and Secondary. Also with the use of quantative and qualitative methods under each primary and secondary method of research, so using both quantative and qualitative a wide variety of data can be gained.

Primary Sources

Quantitative

When it comes down to using primary sources as a method to gain data, The easiest and an extremely effective method is the questionnaire; With the use of a questionnaire gaining yes and no answers from an array of questions. It's possible to gain data to create graphs, charts and trends so it gives the idea of what "in this case computer security" is used and how effective this security is.

Using a questionnaire to gaining data on security, with a subject range of 10-20 people answering the questionnaire within the university and out if the university a wide range of answers can be gained, to create a statistical chart and a trend chart, on security methods and security usage and how effective they are for the user.

Qualitative

Here interviewing will be used to gain the data, with open sourced questions, getting the user to give their own opinion on the topic. With the open questions its guaranteed that the answers will not be exactly the same, therefore the data can be processed and shown as they are answered to try and prove the hypothesis.

4 people will be interviewed outside of the university. As getting the data from people outside the university can work out better, because these people may not be up-to-date with security methods and have been open to attack with the security they, this showing the security faults and that the hypothesis is correct, the data intended to gain, will be revolving around the flaws in security software's. The answers provided from the research will be directly copied into the report as evidence.

Secondary Sources

Quantitative and Qualitative

Here secondary sources both Quantitative and Qualitative methods will be used in conjunction. Through the use of the internet to research computer security; the internet provides information pages, surveys people have completed, FAQ's, articles and more.
The internet is going to be used to gain as many resources as necessary to prove the hypothesis, mainly through the use of articles and other people's opinions and information pages about security facts. the pure facts being Quantitative and opinion surveys being the Qualitative side.