Computer Science Test 3 Nddc Scholarship

Software is legally protected as intellectual property under copyright laws. When a school makes unauthorized copies, it is committing software piracy, which deprives developers of their rightful revenue. Consequently, the institution faces significant legal risks, including being sued or prosecuted, resulting in heavy fines or other criminal penalties as defined by regional or international law.

Decryption is the mathematical process of transforming scrambled, unreadable 'ciphertext' back into its original 'plaintext' format. While encoding and decoding are general terms for changing data formats for storage or transmission, decryption specifically involves using a secret cryptographic key to unlock data that has been intentionally hidden through encryption to ensure security.

A security hoax is a form of social engineering designed to spread misinformation and cause unnecessary panic among users. Unlike actual viruses or worms, which contain harmful code, a hoax relies on the user to manually spread the message. These often instruct users to delete essential system files or clog up email servers by forwarding the alert to their entire contact list.

The operating system (OS) serves as the software layer that manages all computer hardware and user interactions. One of its core functions is security and access control, which it performs by managing user profiles, passwords, and permissions. This ensures that only authorized individuals can access specific files, applications, or administrative settings on the machine.

A Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network is a decentralized communication model where individual computers (peers) connect directly to one another to share resources and files without the need for a central server. While these services became famous for music and movie sharing, the underlying technology allows each node to act as both a client and a server simultaneously.

Information security refers to the strategies and tools used to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction. It focuses on maintaining the 'CIA Triad': Confidentiality (data is private), Integrity (data is accurate/unaltered), and Availability (data is accessible to authorized users when needed).

The Computer Misuse Act 1990 was designed by the UK government to provide a legal framework for prosecuting individuals who gain unauthorized access to computer systems (hacking). It was created in response to the growing awareness of digital crime, making it a criminal offense to access or modify computer material without permission or for fraudulent purposes.

A firewall acts as a protective barrier between a trusted internal network and untrusted external networks, such as the internet. It inspects all incoming and outgoing data packets and determines whether to allow or block them based on a predefined set of security rules, preventing hackers and malicious software from infiltrating the organization's systems.

CAPTCHA stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.' It typically requires users to identify distorted text or specific objects in images. This prevents automated 'bots' from performing tasks like creating fake accounts, sending spam, or participating in brute-force attacks by requiring human cognitive skills to solve.

Copy protection encompasses various technical methods used by developers to physically prevent or restrict the duplication of software. While copyright provides the legal framework to punish piracy, copy protection includes digital measures such as product keys, encryption, and digital rights management (DRM) to make it technically difficult for users to share or install software without a valid license.