Additional information (ro)

Rogue third parties

It doesn't matter what you think of it, but the internet is for a lot of companies just one big money-farm: they don't care about people's rights, they only care about their own bankaccounts. As a result of that many individuals and organisations develop SDK's (Software Development Kits) for example, to offer them to webdevelopers to implement on their websites. For a webdeveloper that can be very attractive: these companies sometimes offer a percentage of the profit and on top of that: the application seems to look nice and seems to bring an extra dimension to your website. But that doesn't always mean that it's a safe practice: these applications can do many other things behind the screens that you do not see on the front-end, like collecting visitor-data or even worse.

If we could be 100% sure that every webdeveloper exactly knows what these third-party applications do, then there is nothing to worry about, but the reality is different: many webdevelopers are careless and copy-paste scripts just because "some people" on "some forum" say that it's awesome and often unknowingly they put their visitors at risk. This doesn't always mean that the website-user finds himself as a victim of a crime: lots of times their data is being sold to big companies without even being noticed, useless to say that privacy is at stake here. And as I said earlier: it can be worse too.

Rootkit

A rootkit is a type of computer program that hides in the system and is capable of giving constant access to another individual. This attacker is then able to spy on the victim, change system settings, open log-files etc. without being noticed by the owner. This typically is the programs' behaviour: staying unnoticed.
Rootkits can contain a number of tools allowing hackers to steal your passwords or credit card or online banking information. Rootkits can also give hackers the ability to subvert or disable security software and track the keys you tap on your keyboard, making it easy for criminals to steal information.
The two most widely distributed types of rootkit are the user mode rootkit and the kernel mode rootkit. In kernel mode the program has administrator-access to the system, which is a lot more than he has in user mode.
 

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