Virtual Viciousness
~ A Blog on Cyber Crime and it’s impacts by Rahul Sharan S
Cybercrime is any unlawful activity that involves a laptop, networked tool, or a network. Information technology provides us with many benefits but also makes us vulnerable to a wide range of cyber threats. A minor mistake from our end can open the door to cybercriminals so it is an absolute necessity nowadays to know how to safeguard ourselves from cybercrimes.
Cybercrimes can aim at computer networks or use computer networks to commit other criminal activities. Sometimes they commit both together; they target computers with the virus and then use them to spread the malware to other computers or to an entire network.
Cybercrimes are committed mostly to generate income for cyber criminals but are also committed to breaching the security of an individual, organization, or nation. To generate income, these cybercriminals indulge in stealing and reselling identities, gaining access to financial accounts, and using credit cards fraudulently to obtain funds. They randomly invite individuals and often do not target a specific individual. The victim is mostly selected because they would have responded to an email, or a random message or would have visited some insecure website.
Ransomware, phishing, credit card fraud, data breaches, and making internet services unavailable to users are a few of the common cyber crimes committed worldwide. Each year new types of cybercrimes are emerging as these criminals are well organized, use advanced technologies, and are highly skilled technically. Cybercrimes typically do not arise in a vacuum; they are actually more dispersed. Cybercriminals normally depend on different executors to finish off their crimes.
According to a report published by McAfee, the economic impact of cybercrimes has cost the global economy nearly $600 billion annually. Losses are not only related to direct financial losses but also the steps taken to increase cyber security and loss of reputation and customers have a long-term impact on the economy. Since we are becoming more and more dependent on information technology, it is critical that we should be aware of the risks and take stringent measures to protect our money and data from cybercrime. Using strong passwords, using secure devices, judicious usage of social media, using antivirus software, not opening spam email links, and not visiting untrusted websites; we can keep ourselves protected from cybercrimes by doing these bare minimum things.
Cybercrimes can hit so hard that users of the internet should expect that their personal data has been stolen and is on the dark web -a part of the web which is intentionally hidden and is used to conceal and promote heinous activities. The estimated size of the deep web is as much as a staggering 5000 times that of the surface web and is growing at a rate that defies quantification. The dark web is the main tool for exchanging malware, exploiting kits and cyber attack services, which could be used to attack the victims- businesses, governments, utilities, and essential service providers.
The greatest ever form of cybercrime that is growing at a huge scale is Ransomware, it is a malware that infects computers and restricts their files, often threatening permanent data destruction unless a ransom amount is paid. This form has reached epidemic proportions globally and is the “go-to method of attack” for cybercriminals.
It is predicted that the world will store 200 terabytes of data by 2025, according to IT experts. This includes data stored in private and public infrastructure, cloud storage, personal data, etc. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of the US labor force was working from home, which led to sharing of more data remotely through cloud apps. Therefore the number of security blind spot balloons is insanely huge.
We have entered into the era of the data world- which brings us to the revelatory world of artificial intelligence which can be trained on big data sets that have been collected over decades. They can analyze terabytes of data per day which is on a scale that is unimaginable for humans. Such technology in the wrong hands is bound to cause more chaos.
In recent times, the world seems to be threatened with an innumerable amount of cyber threats mostly owing to the stark influx and growth of the internet in office and personal affairs. Compartmentalization of information and its safekeeping is relatively impossible but it’s important that we allow the specialists to keep up the good work to try and do their best to save the information and our own private data, as with the growing age of digital advancement the thievery of important data can be more devastating than the thievery of millions of dollars.
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