Cyber Age Exposed

- Jatsya Mohla

With the exponential rise of technology in the past decade, our way of living has enhanced. Today we are connected with people who are not even near us and can access our bank accounts from anywhere without any paperwork, learn anything for free, and a lot more. With the advancement of technology, another identity of an individual has been made, called the social Id, which holds significant personal information. The privacy of our data is necessary because, with our social Id, anyone can commit crimes, spread fake rumors, and disturb the relation between people. A cyber attack is an assault launched by cybercriminals using unethical practices against a network of computers. It can maliciously disable computers, steal data, or use a breached computer as a launch point for other attacks. The person on the other side can gain your personal information, passwords, your chats with others that he can control at his wit. At present most of the prime data is stored in computers. Attacks like these can compromise our privacy and security. The loophole feature of cyberspace is that it pits the offense to a superior position than the defense that means it is difficult to find out the hackers’ identity, which increases the confidence of these wrongdoers. From time-to-time these attacks have shaken the world from January to September 2019, there were over 7.9 billion data records — a 33% increase from the same time in 2018. In the first quarter of 2020, exposed records were pacing at a climb of 273% over last year, yet the recent twitter breach incident is one of the far-reaching attacks.

Verified Twitter accounts of 130 celebrities (including Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, Former US President Sir Barak Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden) had hacked, they posted messages soliciting Bitcoins, doubling the donated money, private messages had sent from these accounts. The exact amount of money that has stolen from this scam is still not known. It is assumed to be in thousands of dollars in the least. We don’t even know who is responsible for this mishap or who should be held accountable for paying up the victims. This attack caused a state of panic for individuals because if someone can access these verified high profile accounts, then it will be a piece of cake to hack ordinary person accounts and get their personal information. It has led to a distrust of people on twitter. Twitter is one of the most downloaded applications in the world, with over 1.5 Billion downloads. Events and news are firstly uploaded on twitter by a politician, sports figure, movie stars, others, and from this information get broadcasted to other media. A reputed platform like twitter to get breached is a disturbing and concerning matter. For now, it only caused money loss picture what would have happened if an attacker would have posted something disturbing or something that would have led to conflict between nations and raise trust issues on the privacy of our personal information. Attacks like this directly aim to challenge or pose a threat to cybersecurity experts. I believe that the rise of these attacks can cause harm in our lives and will affect our way of living for the worse.

But a question arises, are all hackers terrible?

White Hat Hacker — These are the hackers who protect us from these cyber attacks by making firewalls, Antivirus, Security systems so that our information is safe and sound to protect businesses and support them in the ongoing battle against cyber threats. They find vulnerabilities and provide solutions to solve them before other hackers find them. Even there is a qualification and organization specifically for them — the CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) from the EC Council.

Grey Hat Hackers — These hackers hack other systems to prove themselves or for fun but do not intend any harm to society. They don’t care about stealing from people, nor want to help particular people.

Black Hat Hackers — Black hat hackers are responsible for cyber attacks. They sit back in a room and use their knowledge to break into your business, steal bank details, money, or confidential data to cause harm or get rich. They usually use these stolen resources for their gain, to sell on to the black market, or to extort the target business.

Cyber Threats is a National Security Issue. In the cyberage, all prime data get stored in digital devices that seem convenient but lay data at risk. An effective cyberattack will compromise the security of the nation and its people. Even compromising data of an individual can put the whole country at risk. Therefore cybersecurity is essential for individuals, companies, economies, government, and nation as a whole. It had seen that in some previous cyber assault government virtually lost control of the country’s military, civilian structure because the communication, financial, transportation networks hacked that put the lives of millions at risk. The risk is high because only a handful of nations had nuclear weapons during the days of the cold war. But in the current scenario, countries have Nuclear weapons, and one mistake or being unprepared could lead to war or a massacre of Billions. Just imagine what would happen if a terrorist group gets successful in a cyberattack, so it has become a national issue to make sure that any cyber-attack, major or minor, should be prevented. But we can’t depend on others for our safety; it is our responsibility to keep ourselves safe from such threats and use all the prevention measures that we possibly can.

Here are some tips to avoid getting hacked

• Avoid using the same password for different purposes.
• Use firewalls and antivirus.
• Only download apps from trusted and authorized sources.
• Avoid using the Administrator as your Default Setting.
• Update your applications, Operating System, software regularly.
• Encrypt to keep your stuff unreadable.
• Back up data.
• Deny friend requests from an unknown person.
• Use a VPN.
• Access your accounts only from trusted devices.
• Update passwords regularly.

Conclusion

In the end, it is true that we should be concerned about these attacks but should not create a state of panic, also not stop using social media as technology is our key to the future. But should use it in limited access as we have to defend against the cyber attackers. Better be safe than sorry.