Crime has had a big role in the evolution of IT, with more
and more complex viruses being made, anti-virus software has had to right new
codes to detect and destroy them before they infect the PC.
Cybercrime is a huge problem as it puts millions of people’s
information at risk of fraud and theft. It comes in many forms to catch people
and companies out. For example hacking can be carried out in a number of ways,
for example a DDOS attack can be staged on a server and uses lots of other
infected machines to overcrowd the space and therefore cause a server crash
which in turn gives the hacker access to the information stored within.
Another
form of cybercrime is piracy, the taking and using of unlicensed goods, one of
the key culprits of this are Torrent files. When someone downloads a torrent
file they then use torrent software to eventually get it, the reason why it is
such a threat is that it’s virtually untraceable, this is because the files is
split into hundreds of sub-files which are then stored on hundreds of host PC’s
owned by users to when needed, be downloaded one by one and put back together
this makes it very hard to track who the file belongs to amongst all of the
traffic.
Another form of cybercrime is Phishing, this is where an email is sent
to a host mimicking a known website such as a bank and it will ask for the
details of that person, if the person is fooled by the message they will enter
their details and give them to the hacker to be used for theft of money or even
sold if it is a valued account. RAT attacks are when a virus such as a Trojan horse
is put on a host PC and if it becomes infected the hacker can gain complete
control over the machine.
Preventing crime
These types of crime can be prevented in a number of ways. For
example torrents are usually found on a piracy website such as pirate bay, these
sites are found and shut down by the government; however this can be futile as
more proxies of the website are made so it becomes very hard to track. A way to
deal with phishing is to know the rules of asking for information for a bank
and always check the URL of the website that you are entering in your details,
on top of this you can compare the actual website by typing it in Google and
comparing to see if it is real.
RAT attacks can easily be prevented by downloading
anti-virus software to detect and delete the viruses before they infect the
machine.
