The Threat of Online Security: How Safe is Our Data?
We are living in a digital world. We use emails and messenger to keep in touch with our friends and families. We upload images to social sites such as Facebook and Friendster. We do Internet banking. We purchase online flight tickets. We even shop online. As we slowly shifting our daily interaction or activities from the physical world into the digital world, how sure are we that our data is securely transfer? Or are we risking our privacy for the sake of convenience?
Image adapted from Jackson Benefit Group LLC
Like the physical world, there are many bad people in the digital world as well. They are interested in causing trouble to us by hacking into our account and take advantage of our private information for other malicious intention. So, if we are equipped with a weak password, those nasty intruders would able to guess our password without using any sophisticated tracking tools. Even if we are armed with a military-grade password, those genius intruder able to affix a bug or tracking device under our keyboards or simply create a phishing site to lure us into their trap, thus revealing our precious password to them.
Even we are sending emails, the process of sending the mail to the recipient could be tapped and confidential data could be leaked at the hands of the hacker. When we signed into our messenger, various messengers-ads will pop-up sent by our friends who are actually a victim of the messenger-spam chain, which includes advertisements or phishing sites to lure curious users to click the links. When we clicked the link, we actually downloading the malicious software and with the help self-installation, the "spy bug" will be installed into our computer. The spy bug will trace our log in information and password, thus giving it the access to send various fake ads links to our friends in the contact list. Some sophisticated spy bugs are even able to access to your email system and send fake ads links to all the friends in your address book. With the recent feature of allowing users to send offline message, these spy bug took the advantage to nag users by sending offline ads links.
A Real Life Example of Messenger SPAM
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It is human nature to keep things in the cupboard or storage area for future use. It is the same in the digital world. We do backup of precious photos, documents and videos to the Internet, trusting our Internet will be the secure and perfect storage area. Unlike in the physical world where we could lock in with padlocks, padlocks in digital world could be easily hacked if we have a weak password. Once our information are uploaded to the Internet, we are actually making them more vulnerable as the Internet makes our data easily accessable to anyone. Even we do trust our government in safeguarding our personal information, cases such as the biggest identity theft occurred in London where the tax authority had lost the data of 25 million people makes us doubtful on how far we can trust the level of security of the Internet in protecting our data.
Furthermore, with the increasing popularity of doing online transaction, more and more users prefer to shop or perform online banking through the Internet. However, with the high intelligence of the hackers, they are capable to duplicate the same website you used to shop, which you could easily submitting confidential data to these hackers. Hackers usually take opportunity when there is a seasonal hikes in the usage of online transaction, for example Transformer 2 release. A hacker could easily duplicate a cinema website and publish them at the convenience of the customers. Its like setting up a trap, waiting for desperate customers to fall into the trap.
GSC Temporary Site (on the first week of Transformer 2 launch): Potential Target for Phishing Site
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With so much vulnerabilities in the Internet, are we going to un-plug our Internet lines and remain shut forever in the offline world? Of course not. We have to take security measures to ensure our vulnerable data are safe from any potential hackers. To protect ourselves and our data, please read the post on Ways To Safeguard Our Personal Data by Dillen, or find out more about Phishing Sites by Kaw and the advantages of 3rd Party Security Certificates by Ally. With these security measurement taken, we could at least reduce the probability of our precious information being leaked out to the public.
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