HOW WILL THEY FIND YOU?
Do you know
how much information you are leaving on the internet? Through Facebook alone you've given out your email, name, birthday, places you like to eat, places you like to visit, friends, maybe even your phone number. If you made any purchases in Candy Crush or Farmville, your credit card information is also stored. If we sit down for a second and think about it, anyone who has gained access to our Facebook by any means has a timeline of our lives. For the majority of us, our whole life is displayed on this site from the moment we are born (quite literally for some) to every major event. Many of you are probably like, “Zibran what are you trying to say here, this is all information I'm giving out to my friends that I trust.” What if I told you the people you are sharing this with aren't the only ones looking.
A rising problem in today's society is the risk of cyber-attacks. A cyber-attack is when an individual or organization targets computer information systems, infrascructures, computer networks, or personal computers by various malicious acts. This can come from anywhere around the globe and many times goes without notice. The simplest form of a cyber-attack is DDOS, or distributed denial of service. During a DDOS, the servers are flooded with requests that cause it to slow down and eventually crash. These attacks are normally done to make a statement and aimed at political figures or groups.
Between July 11 and July 17 of this year, a group called Anonymous took down over a thousand Israeli websites in protest of the Gaza Israeli conflict. Anonymous is a group of "hacktivist" that see it as their duty to inform the public of what they believe to be corrupt entities. Previously they took down the national website of Nigeria after it had passed a law that would make homosexuality punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. Some see Anonymous as revolutionaries, others see them as criminals.
Unfortunately not all hackers see themselves as political do-gooders like Anonymous, many in fact are looking for a financial gain. Between November 27 and December 15 of last year, Target's data base was hacked. 110 million accounts were compromised and customer names, credit or debit cards, expiration dates, and CVV were taken. This resulted in unauthorized ATM withdrawls and credit cards being made. How big of an impact was this? J.P Morgan Chase had put a limitation on ATM withdraws to $100 a day and purchases to $300 a day for any customer who might have been at risk. In this case we, the customers, couldn't really do anything. This breach in security was Targets responsibility. Target did not take the precautions needed to make sure that its information was secured.
It's a scary thought that whenever we swipe our cards to make a purchase someone might be standing there getting ready to take our information.
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