Security Online

Protecting Yourself from Electronic Criminals

Back in the early 90's, when personal computers were becoming popular, we all thought that the use of personal computers would move the world into a realm that it had never been in before - total globalization. We were right, and today, large numbers of the people in the world either have a personal computer in their homes, or have access to a computer. We are able to chat with people on the other side of the world. We can send and receive files in seconds - as opposed to waiting days, or even weeks for postal deliveries - and we have total access to just about any information we could possibly want or need. However, we never imagined that personal computers would be used against us, or how that total access to information could harm us.

Imagine, if you will, a twelve year old boy sitting at his personal computer. You might think he was playing a video game, doing homework, or possibly even looking at sites that would make his mother very angry. But, he isn't doing any of those things. Instead, he is using a malicious spider program to scan forums and websites, which actually captures any email addresses that have been used on the website. This is a typical spammer's way of getting email addresses. But this little boy has no intention of spamming you. Instead, when he feels he has enough addresses, he is going to send out an email, using an email cloaker, or possibly even by hijacking someone else's email account, and that email will have a malicious virus - which he actually wrote - attached to it.

While he is busy doing that, someone else is writing a freeware program that thousands of people will want to download. It may be a game or a helpful application - the point is that it will be free. However, there is no reason for him to do all this work to write the program, and not get paid for it. He finds out that he can make the program, and distribute it freely - and add a few bits of code supplied by a marketing company to earn some money for his program. That code is actually spyware, which will record the surfing habits of everyone who downloads and installs the program. He can also add code to the program that will cause advertisements to pop up on your desktop, or set your browser's home page to something that you didn't expect, and earn money that way. This is called adware.

Someone else is writing a program that they will never take credit for. Again, it may be a game or a helpful application. But instead of spyware or adware, this program will contain code that actually records keystrokes, or allows the creator of the program to get into your system and look around your hard drive - finding personal information and credit card or bank information. They generally won't be using this information themselves, because the risk of getting caught is high - but you can bet that they will be selling your information to other people, who will use it.

This isn't a fantasy, and these are not really hypothetical scenarios. This is going on right now. And it will be going on every day of every year - probably for all time. While the use of personal computers, and the Internet, has brought us so many opportunities, and so much knowledge into our lives, it has also made us very vulnerable, and we have to know how to protect ourselves from people who simply want to cause hardware or software damage to our computers, people who want to steal our information, and even from people who want to learn as much as they can about us to stalk us.

We mistakenly think that computer hackers are computer geeks who have a great deal of technical knowledge. While this may have been true at one time, it is no longer the case. Now, 90% of all hacking activity is done by amateur hackers. These are people who really don’t know much about hacking, but have all the gadgets that make the job quite easy. These hacking gadgets are easily downloaded from the internet.

When you think about what can be done to you, electronically, it is enough to make you never want to turn on your computer again. But that isn't the answer. First, we've come too far to turn back now, and this wouldn't solve the problem anyway. You would also have to cut all ties with any business that uses computers to store their customer's information - including your local utility companies. So, you see, whether you use a computer or not, you are still vulnerable. The only answer is to take the fullest security measures that you can possibly take to protect your system, learn how to protect your identity on the Internet, and hope that the companies that you do business with are taking those same security measures.