The Internet: Cybersecurity & Crime

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 even

in 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 competing

for bragging rights. Today the largest countries not only have a regular army

but also have a well armed cyber army. In fact the next World War may not be

fought with traditional weapons, but with computers used to shut down national

water supplies, energy grids, and transportation systems. Hi my name is Parisa and

I'm Google Security Princess. I've worked on a lot of different products

and a lot of different ways to try and make our software as secure as possible. Now let's take a look at how cybercrime

works under the hood will learn about software viruses,

denial-of-service attacks, and phishing scams. In biology and life, a virus is an

organism that is spread by coughing, sneezing, or physical contact. Viruses work by infecting cells,

injecting their genetic material, and using those cells to replicate. They can make people really sick and then spread to other people. A computer virus works bit similarly. A

virus is an executable program that gets installed, usually unintentionally, and harms the user and their computer. It's also possible for a virus to spread itself to other

computers. Now how does a virus get on your computer in the first place? There are a

couple ways an attacker can infect someone's computer. They might lure a victim into

installing a program with deception about the program's purpose, so for example a lot

of viruses are disguised as security updates. It's also possible that the software on your computer has a vulnerability, so an attacker can install itself without even needing explicit permission. Once a virus is on your computer it can

steal or delete any of your files, control other programs, or even allow

someone else to remotely control your computer. Using computer viruses, hackers can take

over millions of computers world wide and then use them as a digital army, otherwise known as a botnet, to attack and take down websites. This kind of attack is called a

distributed denial of service. A denial of service is when hackers

overwhelm a website with too many requests. We call it a distributed

denial-of-service when the attack comes from many computers all at once. Most websites are ready to respond to

millions of requests a day, but if you hit them with billions or trillions of requests, coming from different places, the computers are overloaded and stop

responding. Another trick used by cybercriminals is to send large amounts of spam

email in an attempt to trick people into sharing sensitive personal information. This is called a phishing scam. A phishing scam is when you get what seems like a trustworthy email asking you to log

into your account, but clicking the email takes you to a fake website. if you log in anyway you've been

tricked into giving your password away. Hackers can then use your login

credentials to access your real accounts to steal information or maybe even to

steal your money. Fortunately there are many companies, laws, and government

organizations working to make the internet safer, but these efforts are

not enough. You may think when a computer system

gets hacked the problem was the security design or the software. Ninety percent

of the time the system gets hacked however, it's not because of the security bug, but because of a simple mistake made by a human. It turns out there are steps we

can all take to protect ourselves. Often your actions not only impact the

security of your own data and computer, but the security of everyone at your school, workplace, and home. With billions or

trillions of dollars at stake cybercriminals get smarter each year and

we all need to keep up.