Tricks of the hacker

Lately I have received a couple of suspicious emails that seem innocent and from people I know, mostly consisting of quick get rich schemes. Coming from a trusted friend it can seem genuine. But then the same type of message would come from different people on my contact list. So when I confront these people about the emails, fortunately without opening the links, they would say they didn't send such emails. So who did?

There are geniuses who have too much time on their hands, they have decided to hack into people's privacy using the World Wide Web and unfortunately some of those on my mailing list are victims.

Through this, the hackers have managed to do a lot of damage both on a small and big scale.

On one occasion, the world's largest credit card payments processor recently got hacked. Over 1.5 million cards from Visa and MasterCard were digitally stolen through a cyber attack. This is just the latest in a series of brazen attacks on some of America's largest and most secure companies.

Or on a smaller scale, private pictures or videos have been displayed publicly without the owner of these pictures or videos ever knowing how.

Besides stealing and exposing individual privacy, some hackers have bigger plans in mind, Terrorist attacks! How? By hacking or hijacking computer networks of their enemies to steal secret information that could contribute to war, like weapon blueprints, operational plans and significant surveillance data.

They also at times, sabotage equipment used to control computer networks. This can be very destructive since the 21st century is so reliant on computer controlled facilities.

According to Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, one in three online computers is remotely controlled by a hacker and not the owner of the device or email address. An alarming find, making the emailing facility very unreliable.

One is using Virus; this is the most popular one in the 21st century. This form of hacking works by injecting a few specialised lines of code into an otherwise harmless executable file.

The infected file is then made available for download on the Internet, and the downloader's gadget subsequently become infected with the virus.

As web technology advanced, some hackers discovered an internet security flaw that allowed them to install the malicious program directly onto a user's computer when the user simply visited a certain website.

By exploiting security holes in web browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, the program could be quietly downloaded and installed in the background. Once the program infects the machine, the hacker can easily access the machine, take over the machine, or use the infected computer to send bulk advertising (spam) without fear of punishment.

So if you have noticed the IT guys in your firm getting strict with internet or device access, it's because of safety.

Prevention is better than cure and to prevent a whole institute from crashing to the ground because money has been stolen by hackers or significant information is in the wrong hands, IT security has probably doubled its strength.

The reputation of a company could be tainted if it has just once been known to be hacked, no one would want to invest or share information with a company that's easily hacked, it would be a risky and an unwise move.

To counter this problem, according to Forbes, the world's largest search engine Google, has been offering up rewards to security researchers and friendly hackers to find flaws or bugs in its programming for a while.

There have been several people that have collected rewards for finding these bugs by notifying Google rather than trying to exploit the issues. Google has now announced that it has increased the available rewards for reporting bugs to as much as $20,000 per bug.