The Internet: Cybersecurity and Crime
Hi, my name's Jenny Martin and I'm the director of cyber security investigations at Symantec.
Today cybercrime causes huge problems for society personally, financially, and evenin matters of national security.
Just in the last few years hundreds of millions of credit card numbers have been stolen,tens of millions of Social Security numbers and healthcare records were compromised, even nuclear centrifuges that have been hacked, and unmanned aerial drones have been hijacked. This is all done by exploiting vulnerabilities in hardware and software or more often by taking advantage of unintentional decisions made by the people using the software.
People committing these cyber crimes don't a single profile or motivation it could be anyone from an international terrorist to a teenager competingfor bragging rights.
Today the largestcountries not only have a regular armybut also have a well armed cyber army.
Infact the next World War may not befought with traditional weapons, but withcomputers used to shut down nationalwater supplies, energy grids, andtransportation systems. Hi my name is Parisa andI'm Google Security Princess.
I've workedon a lot of different productsand a lot of different ways to try andmake our software as secure as possible.
Now let's take a look at how cybercrimeworks under the hoodwill learn about software viruses,denial-of-service attacks, and phishingscams.
In biology and life, a virus is anorganism that is spread by coughing,sneezing, or physical contact. Viruses work by infecting cells,injecting their genetic material, andusing those cells to replicate. They can make people really sick and then spread to other people. A computer virus works bit similarly.
Avirus is an executable program that getsinstalled, usually unintentionally, and harms the user and their computer.
It's alsopossible for a virus to spread itself to othercomputers.
Now how does a virus get on yourcomputer in the first place? There are acouple ways an attacker can infect someone'scomputer.
They might lure a victim intoinstalling a program with deception about theprogram's purpose, so for example a lotof viruses are disguised as security updates.
It's also possible that the software on your computer has a vulnerability, so an attacker can install itselfwithout even needing explicit permission.
Once a virus is on your computer it cansteal or delete any of your files,control other programs, or even allowsomeone else to remotely control yourcomputer. Using computer viruses, hackers can takeover millions of computers world wideand then use them as a digital army, otherwise known as a botnet, to attack and take down websites. This kind of attack is called adistributed denial of service.
A denial of service is when hackersoverwhelm a website with too manyrequests.
We call it a distributeddenial-of-service when the attack comes from manycomputers all at once. Most websites are ready to respond tomillions of requests a day, but if youhit them with billions or trillions of requests, coming from different places,the computers are overloaded and stopresponding. Another trick used bycybercriminals is to send large amounts of spamemail in an attempt to trick peopleinto sharing sensitive personal information. This is called a phishing scam.
A phishing scam is when you get what seems like atrustworthy email asking you to loginto your account, but clicking the emailtakes you to a fake website.
if you log in anyway you've beentricked into giving your password away.
Hackers can then use your logincredentials to access your real accountsto steal information or maybe
even tosteal your money. Fortunately there aremany companies, laws, and governmentorganizations working to make theinternet safer, but these efforts arenot enough.
You may think when a computer systemgets hacked the problem was the securitydesign or the software. Ninety percentof the time the system gets hackedhowever, it's not because of the security bug, but because of a simple mistake made bya human.
It turns out there are steps wecan all take to protect ourselves.
Oftenyour actions not only impact thesecurity of your own data and computer, but thesecurity of everyone at your school,workplace, and home.
With billions ortrillions of dollars at stakecybercriminals get smarter each year andwe all need to keep up.