Passive
"Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance."
The word passive can both be used for the user victim and the type of attack that makes them the victim. If a person doesn't attempt to protect themselves, then they are by definition, passive to the threats all around. The threats themselves are also passive, because they aren't directed.
What can only be described as wide spread chaos, the Internet is a thriving center of both directed and not directed threats. A virus can be written both to attack particular people, or just attack anyone who touches it.
Lets walk in the shoes of a malicious person, who wants to take advantage of people who don't know any better. Just like a normal person, he or she doesn't want to do anything too complicated. You see, a good hacker, whether white hat, black hat, a threat or a good guy, likes the elegant type of solution. The simplest answer is the best one. In the case of our malicious person, lets say that he or she creates a picture file, with a virus in it, and emails it out. And that email is forwarded by people because they thought the picture was funny.
You can say that this email was not directed to anybody in particular, but people still got infected.
Not all hackers are out to get you directly... they fish. They fish to see who would bite. Who would take their bait? Sometimes people don't even know that clicking that picture and looking at it is the equivalent of taking the bait.
Now passive threats can come in many different ways... it could be because a site has threats in their ads, you don't even have to click those. It could be because you got an email from your "bank" but it linked to a page that wasn't really their page. It could be just as simple as giving your computer access to the internet and visiting just one website.
Passives are dangerous, but they're sadly a part of the risk of surfing the Web. In later posts we'll cover ways to try to make your journey through the Internet as safe as possible. Remember, there is no such thing as 100% safety when it comes to computers.
~F.Zver
