Sylvie and Hannah 

Censorship is the process of blocking certain information from being viewed or/and heard, and is usually information which is considered obscene, indecent or controversial. 

Article 1

Article 2

Self-harming

Anorexia

Bomb-making

Suicides

Article 3

Shaunna and Yasmin

− The lack of control over who can access the internet. This is the first point that you’re able to make, and it becomes the overall basic outline of an answer; the point can be extended upon by talking about how the little to no control over who is able to access the internet, means that hackers are able to gain easy access to a network connection; often with very little restriction and with very little put in place to stop the user causing major damage.

− Lack of policing of documents and files on the internet. Very similar to the last point, and one that can be used to be the opening for other arguments within this topic, the little policing of the internet leads to files being spread that are labelled to be one thing, but are actually something else, in the case of cyber-attacks the something else will likely be a virus. These viruses can function in many ways, for example, the NHS was struck by a virus called a ‘Trojan-Horse’ which locks a user out of their system, and will only allow a user access if they pay a fee (the caveat of this virus being a user will often still be locked out of their system even after they have paid the fee). The problem with this is that it is impossible to police all the files that are uploaded to the internet due to the volume of uploads. This point of this is often broken down as an econometric problem, as users will point out that the number of people who would need to be employed to police something as global as the internet would cost beyond the budget that is given to any poling force in the world.

 

Example of recent Cyber-attacks 

− NHS Trojan horse: This is the example that was given as part of the answer summary, and occurred when a low-level user on an NHS system received a virus that locked them out of their system, one of the problems of networks is that they allow the easy distribution of files through the network, meaning that once the virus was on the network, it was very easy for it to spread.

− Yahoo security breach: The final example of cyber-attacks within this topic was the breach of information that occurred when a user was able to use a hacking technique called ‘brute forcing’ (meaning a programme was created that would try to guess password of a given high level user i.e. a network manager over and over again until they gained access) by doing this the users were able to gain access to user information of over 1,000,000,000 users, which they would now be able to sell or user to try and find bank account details etc. 

 

Cyber-attack model answer

When discussing control over the internet there is one overwhelming concern for some users, and this is that they may fall victim to a cyber-attack. The problem with cyber-attacks is that a lack of overall policing of the internet leads to hackers being able to gain access to user based networks that should be restricted, an example of this being the breach of privacy, when a hacker accessed all the user data of Yahoo account holders. The second problem is that files are able to be uploaded to the internet with no actual proof of function, meaning a file that says it will install ‘Microsoft Word’ may actually install a virus, like that see when the NHS was struck by a Trojan Horse attack, leading to a large and very serious delay in productivity.
Ieuan