Cyber crime has been a problem in technology for pretty much as long as a computer has been around. People know as “hackers” sit behind their screen, and can steal information, money, and much more from a single person or in some cases a whole company, and sell it so that it can later on being exposed. When this happens, companies and people reputation can be completely ruined. I think cyber crime is a huge problem for everyone because of the possibility of people having very valuable information stolen and exposed, and because businesses often neglect cybersecurity causing them to become compromised by hackers.
One of my points is that businesses often neglect cybersecurity. When I say neglect, that means they choose not to invest in proper protection of their information. According to The Atlantic, AT&T did a survey and the results showed that only 53% of companies with fewer than 50 employees place a high priority on cybersecurity. While 53% may look like a good number, meaning the majority of companies put a high priority on cybersecurity, this also means that 47% of companies didn’t place priority on cybersecurity. To make matters worse, only 30% of small companies provide training on how to recover from breaches. This means 70% of companies could have all of their information stolen, and have no idea how to recover from it. For those companies who don’t value cybersecurity and don’t train on how to recover, most of the time these businesses fall out. The Atlantic says that a main reason businesses neglect cybersecurity is because they don’t realize that they have been compromised. Most of the time information is stolen and used in a larger scheme that has many targets, or in other cases the information is stolen and put away for a later attack. According to Steemit, the aggregate loss of companies due to cyber crime tallies in the billions each year. Thus, data breaches not only impact the companies, but the customers as well. A good example of an information breach is what happened to Equifax where tens of millions of Americans financial information was exposed. Data storage applications such as cloud are helpful for businesses, but they also make the people that use storage center like that vulnerable. Two common forms of cyber crime are DDoS and Phishing. A Distributed Denial of Service, otherwise know as DDoS, is when the hacker sends a high volume of information through a network until the network becomes overloaded and stops functioning. DDoS attacks are near impossible to stop and they make it difficult to sort real traffic from the fake traffic. Phishing is when something that looks like a trustworthy or official third party requests data such as passwords. Most of the time, these attacks take place in emails, where the user is provided a link to click on and enter their personal data. As long as cybersecurity isn’t a requirement for all businesses, cyber crime will still be the main cause to businesses going out fo business.
My other point is that people have valuable and personal information stolen and exposed. In the last paragraph, I talked about the Equifax breach. All information in this paragraph has been taken from Outpost24. In 2017 Equifax, an American credit card company, announced that it had suffered a cyber attack over the course of a few months. They revealed this information 6 weeks after they were hacked. This cyberattack contained names, birthdays, social security numbers, drivers license numbers and much more of over 143 million American, Canadian and British customers. As well as over 200,000 credit card numbers. Because this company didn’t have proper cybersecurity, hundreds of millions of peoples information were stolen. The fact that this could’ve been avoided with proper security makes it so much worse. According to Selfkey, hacker have multiple options once they have stolen data. Most of the time, hackers will scan your data for important information like bank details, logins, photos, messages, etc. Even more often though, hackers will end up selling your information to a third party, often called a “Broker”. A broker buys your card details on a marketplace and resell them a “carder”. The carder then takes as much money out of all the persons accounts before the person or their bank notices. The fact that hacker can get in, get what they want, and then resell leaving no trace of what they did is scary. However, individuals can protect themselves. According to TheNextWeb, things like making sure you’re on a secure WiFi network, checking for weaknesses in your WiFi, disabling and managing third party permissions, encrypting your data yourself, overwriting deleted files and prating the Principle of Least Privilege can all help you defend yourself against hackers. The PoLP is basically telling you to not take on responsibility when its not necessary to. According to TheNext Web, the moment you advertise yourself online as an administrator, it leaves you vulnerable to attacks as a result of compromised files or hardware. While having no cybersecurity leaves many people at risk, it is quite easy to do most of these things yourself, and lower the risk that your information becomes compromised.
Cybersecurity has been and in my opinion always will be a problem. No matter what technological advances are made, people likes hackers are always going to find the back door. Nothing is ever made perfectly. But with the tools the internet can provide us, installing cybersecurity and taking extra precautions can help prevent cyber crime. I think the main reason cyber crime is so prevalent is because companies ignore the fact that they need security, and that hackers can easily access and steal information as well as money from pretty much anyone.
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