Cyber Crimes

From paying bills online, to checking bank balances, to renewing a drivers license, we perform a variety of tasks online unsuspecting of who could be watching or listening to our communications. This convenience has improved our way of life in many ways; however it has also opened our homes to a new breed of criminal. According the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team attacks to the US government agencies have almost doubled over the past year. Of those breaches to government agencies more than seventy percent were attempts to gain unauthorized access to internal systems. Fortunately not everyone that attempted to gain access succeed, never the less an alarming four percent did gain access in some way to a government system and accessed data. (Eisher, 2009) Keep in mind that government and commercial systems are heavily guarded systems. Secured behind a maze of firewalls and computer analysts meant to protect their systems from intrusion, yet experience hackers can find a way to get in and create havoc. It is safe to say that government computer systems are always under attack and in today’s world a lot of those attacks are orchestrated by governments and criminal organizations trying to steal information.

With this is information in mind it is important to do what we can to protect ourselves. Although you may not acknowledge the fact that you too are under constant attack by cyber criminals and/or hackers, you are. From phishing scams were a person tries to defraud an unsuspecting user via email, computer viruses that steel a user’s information in order to gain access to their finances, to credit ATM/Credit card skimmers that record the magnetic information on your card, you are extremely vulnerable. The primary source of danger for the common user is the internet virus, therefore knowing how to prevent your data from theft or your system from being disrupted is crucial to the protection of our wealth. (Brandt, 2009)