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Cyber Threat Gets Personal

Hackers, seemingly all pervasive, become overwhelming fear

Imagine a scenario in which you are driving down the freeway when suddenly, your car’s engine cuts out, your brakes seize up or your steering begins pulling you into oncoming traffic – all because someone has hacked into the computer system built into your car and begun to control it remotely.

Or picture a local gang of thieves using the camera built into your laptop, your baby monitor and the entrance to your home to build up a picture of life and to identify exactly when the house will be empty and where the most valuable items to steal are located.

Extreme as these scenarios seem, they accurately reflect the growing number of dangers that are being created by the never ending progression of digital technologies. Cybercrime is not simply a threat to governments and international corporations; anybody with a home computer or smartphone in their pocket could be targeted. The difference is that while big businesses are aware of the dangers, most of us are not.

In a real life example, a recent video published on the internet demonstrating the ability of two cyber security experts to interfere with a modern computerized vehicle led to the car manufacturer Chrysler recalling nearly 1.5 million vehicles.

Such an occurrence is possible due to what has been termed the “Internet of thing” – the computerization and networking of objects which previously were stand-alone devices. The Internet of things brings with it a lot of benefits such as air conditioning which can be activated with your phone to cool down your house before you arrive home; or security cameras which can be monitored remotely. But equally, it is also allowing cyber-criminals access to our homes, our phones and now, even our cars.
“We’re in the age of connectivity… your fridge, your car, your bills, your phone, your credit card – it’s all connected,” Daniel Cohen, a research fellow in cyber security and military and strategic affairs with The Institute for National Security Studies, told The Media Line. As an example of how our environment is changing, Cohen said, “more than a billion phones were sold in the world last year – every one of them is a computer.” This is especially true among the younger generation, whose “phones are connected to their whole world.”

What security analysts fear is being overlooked by many is that a device that can be remotely accessed by its owner via the Internet can also be penetrated and co-opted by someone else.

“The best way to get into an organization today is through its people, its employees,” Dana Tamir, director of enterprise security at IBM’s Trusteer, told The Media Line. In attacks on large corporations it is often human error which allows malware into a network. This is also true of threats to ordinary citizens who are frequently put at risk by their own ignorance. Despite password protection being a basic feature of modern computing, users continue to leave themselves vulnerable in this area, Tamir said, listing the re-use of passwords between private and professional systems as one of the most serious and common errors.

Opening suspicious emails and visiting untrustworthy websites are also among the easiest ways to infect your computer with malware, Tamir explained, listing pornography, torrent download sites and the dark net – a section of the internet accessible only to those using specialist protocols – as being particularly dangerous.
“One of the things that we as a society need to do is teach young kids before they start using technology about the dangers,” the security analyst said. Teenagers uploading compromising photographs onto the Internet, whether it’s of themselves passed out drunk or of their new credit card “with a cool picture on it,” are prime examples of such ignorance, Tamir suggested.

“Today is a world of money; and data is money,” Gil Nuelander, the chief executive officer at ESET, an Israeli Internet security solution, told The Media Line. The data that all of us hold and produce is valuable to hackers who are using more than just viruses to gain access. “The threat today is social engineering – it uses the low awareness of the user to attack,” he said, explaining that there were basic precautions people could take to protect themselves.

Awareness is the key. People should be conscious of what they are clicking on and who a link has been sent from, Nuelander stated, citing fake bank websites as an example of where user awareness can prevent an attack. A fake bank site appears and acts like an existing online bank page but often has small mistakes – the URL (web address) might be subtly different. When logging into a bank account, a customer should be aware of such details, Nuelander said. Especially, a user should be cautious if they receive an email which appears to be from their bank when they were not expecting correspondence, he added.

Just as important is the maintenance of the computer’s security software. A lot of people become annoyed at having to frequently change their software but most of these patches are designed to keep your security system as up to date as possible, Nuelander explained.

But it was in the area of smartphones that the cyber security executive said the majority of users leave themselves vulnerable. “The real problem is awareness… people are not thinking of their phone as a computer,” he noted. “Almost everybody knows to use virus protection on their desktop or laptop, but most people don’t have the same systems on their phone,” Nuelander pointed out. “This, despite the fact that the majority of us have more sensitive communications on our phone than on our computer – banking, contact details, constant GPS location,” Nuelander concluded.

That people, and not technology, are leaving computers vulnerable to hackers is frequently cited by cyber analysts. If common sense, updated software and an awareness of malware are maintained, then a user can generally feel safe, a spokesperson for Deep Dot Web, a news site which focuses on the happenings of the dark net, told The Media Line. “The weak link is usually the people themselves,” the spokesperson suggested.

Threats from hackers run alongside the increasing side effects of our dependence upon technology. “Society influences the way that technology develops but at the same time technology influences the way our society changes,” Dana Tamir opined. “Because we have more information we don’t remember things as well as we used to – how many people remember phone numbers?” Dependence can become dangerous, she said. “What would happen to you if I took your phone away?”

Daniel Cohen, on the other hand, is less concerned pointing to the fact that in his parents’ generation nobody bothered to lock their front door as there was no fear of thieves. Now, nobody would step outside their home without securing it. In a similar way society will adapt and take on board the importance of cyber security.

“People will learn and are increasingly aware,” Cohen said. “It took time, but today the (police and security services) are better on cyber – they arrest more hackers and it’s more in the news.”