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Imagine waking up one morning to discover all your personal
information has been stolen. Your bank account has been
cleaned out. The project you have been working on for the
past six months has vanished. Your e-mails have been infected
with a virus that has copied itself to all the people you
have ever exchanged e-mails with. You try to make a call
but your mobile phone's address book has been deleted remotely.
Then things start to get really bad.
The computer system protecting your house no longer recognizes
you because the data containing your retina
scan has been stolen. Now you are barred from your home,
so you alert the police, but they are very keen
to talk to you about your recent credit card purchase
in Panama.
It sounds like technophobe's worst nightmare, but it could
be reality.
In America, the FBI reports that cybercrime is rising,
costing individuals and businesses billions of dollars.
And the war on this kind of crime seems hard to win.
Hackers are not looking for individuals, they are looking
for any vulnerable computers.
Sometimes computer users are helping the hacker unknowingly.
Most people do not use complex
methods to protect personal information because most people
think they have very little a hacker might want.
So they often use their birthday as a PIN code to access
bank accounts, mobile phones and other personal information,
to make it easier to remember.
A recent survey from U.S. security company Pentasafe suggested
most people do not know how to set up a password that cannot
be easily worked out. Pentasafe's marketing director David
Blackman said: "Hackers work very logically. Once they
uncover one password to the
PC, getting the one to the cash point isn't rocket science.
There is software available on the Internet which can calculate
passwords."
Even a well-chosen password may not be enough to protect
digital information as some hackers use sophisticated methods
when trying to break into our computers. The most likely
way for bad guys to break into the system is through social
engineering. This involves persuading administrators or
telephonists to give details of passwords or other things
by pretending to be staff, suppliers or trusted individuals
- even police officers. They could be even masquerading
as a computer repair person to get an access to the premises.
And if the hackers do not get you, a virus might.
In 2001, one in 350 e-mails sent contained a virus, while
the notorious
"Code Red" alone cost businesses worldwide about
$2.6 billion, according to the Confederation of British
Industry (CBI). Luckily most Web surfers are aware of viruses.
Clever hackers can secretly install
a back-door "Trojan horse," a small program designed
to spy on people's keyboard movements and record the information
typed.
Trojans are different from viruses because they can lurk
in PCs without anyone noticing and can spy on the computer
user's activities, then send this information back anywhere
in the world.
Cybercriminals are targeting desktop computers connected
to the Web and the growing array of pocket PCs and hand-held
devices. As mobile phones get smarter and carry large amounts
of personal data, they too become easy meat for malicious
coders.
People forget that the mobile phone is a small computer
with memory, important data and an access to the Internet.
These devices should be protected equally carefully, if
not more, than network computers.
Many people in the UK are already suffering from text
message spam or junk mail from rogue mobile firms. The first
mobile virus was found more than a year ago. Called "Timofonica,"
it did not start an epidemic, but we are warned that wireless
security threats grow as the functionality of the handsets
increases.
Hackers are always one step ahead and we must stay vigilant
to keep up with them.
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(633 words)
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