With cyber criminals making more money than the global drug trade in 2018, the complete list of online threats covers way more than we could possibly describe on this page. The most significant online threats can however be summarized as follows:

Botnets: These are a collection of software robots, or ‘bots’, that operate as an army of infected computers (also known as ‘zombies’). They are remotely controlled by the virus creator. Often users are infected without even knowing about it. If you are infected by a botnet virus, your computer will send spam emails with viruses attached to your contact list or be used as part of a denial of service attack against other systems.

DDoS attacks: A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when a malicious user gets a network of zombie computers to sabotage a specific website or server. The attack happens when the malicious user tells all the zombie computers to contact a specific website or server over and over again. That increase in the volume of traffic overloads the website or server causing it to be slow for legitimate users, sometimes to the point that the website or server shuts down completely. It could be possible for malicious users to use your computer in one of these attacks.