The internet has brought us so many brilliant solutions which have greatly improved many aspects of life and business but much like everything in this world there is always the danger that some people look to use these advancements as a way in which to commit crime. In the case of the internet cybercrime is something which is certainly on the rise. In fact we were discussing this recently with the cybercriminal expert Bharat Bhise HNA, who spends much of his time educating others about the clear and present dangers which exist to everyone. When you scratch beneath the surface of cybercrime the truth can be very scary and here are a couple of the ways in which the cybercriminals can attack.
Phishing
Ever received an email from a Nigerian warlord who needs your help getting his millions out of the country? Perhaps you have received a message from a Chinaman who is looking for your help in getting millions of bonds out of a local bank? These are called phishing scams and they are something which many of us would have seen before. The aim of these scams is to get people to click on links in order to download malicious software to their computers, or even worse it is so that people will hand over their private information such as bank accounts.
DoS
A DoS attack or a Denial of Service attack is one which the cybercriminals use not to steal information but rather to cause as much chaos and disruption as they possibly can. To put this in a nutshell this is an attack which seeks to bring down certain systems or computers. The way in which this is done is by bombarding a server or a system with hundreds of thousands of requests at the same time until the system is overwhelmed, at which point it can no longer deal with requests and the system crashes. We have seen this with Sony in recent years after a DoS attack caused the website and the entire network to crash. These attacks must be well coordinated and they will usually feature a wide number of hackers from all over the world.
Password Hack
The reason why we are always told about ensuring that we come up with a hard to guess password is because cracking them can be very easy for cybercriminals. They do this in 2 ways, the first way is to simply use logic to get your password, they will find out as much information on your as possible and then they will use that to guess what your password could be, this is called a brute force attack. The second way of getting your password is called a dictionary attack which basically uses a dictionary of commonly used passwords and simply checks each one until they arrive at the correct password. Passwords of course give access to important information which is exactly why they are so important that you protect.
