The Internet: Cybersecurity & Crime

Parisa Tabriz from Google Jenny Martin from Symantec introduce the most common types of cybercrime including viruses, malware, DDOS attacks and phishing scams. Watch til 4:40 to see the top four tips to avoid getting hacked.

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The Internet: Cybersecurity and Crime

Hi, my name's Jenny Martin and I'm the
director of cyber security

investigations at Symantec. Today
cybercrime causes huge problems for

society personally, financially, and even
in matters of national security. Just in

the last few years hundreds of millions
of credit card numbers have been stolen,

tens of millions of Social Security
numbers and healthcare records were

compromised, even nuclear centrifuges
that have been hacked, and unmanned

aerial drones have been hijacked. This is
all done by exploiting vulnerabilities

in hardware and software or more often
by taking advantage of unintentional

decisions made by the people using the
software. People committing these cyber

crimes don't a single profile or
motivation it could be anyone from an

international terrorist to a teenager competing
for bragging rights. Today the largest

countries not only have a regular army
but also have a well armed cyber army. In

fact the next World War may not be
fought with traditional weapons, but with

computers used to shut down national
water supplies, energy grids, and

transportation systems. Hi my name is Parisa and
I'm Google Security Princess. I've worked

on a lot of different products
and a lot of different ways to try and

make our software as secure as possible.

Now let's take a look at how cybercrime
works under the hood

will learn about software viruses,
denial-of-service attacks, and phishing

scams. In biology and life, a virus is an
organism that is spread by coughing,

sneezing, or physical contact.

Viruses work by infecting cells,
injecting their genetic material, and

using those cells to replicate. They can make people really sick and then spread to other people.

A computer virus works bit similarly. A
virus is an executable program that gets

installed, usually unintentionally, and harms the user and their computer. It's also

possible for a virus to spread itself to other
computers. Now how does a virus get on your

computer in the first place? There are a
couple ways an attacker can infect someone's

computer. They might lure a victim into
installing a program with deception about the

program's purpose, so for example a lot
of viruses are disguised as security updates.

It's also possible that the software on your computer has a vulnerability, so an attacker can install itself

without even needing explicit permission.

Once a virus is on your computer it can
steal or delete any of your files,

control other programs, or even allow
someone else to remotely control your

computer.

Using computer viruses, hackers can take
over millions of computers world wide

and then use them as a digital army, otherwise known as a botnet, to attack and take down websites.

This kind of attack is called a
distributed denial of service.

A denial of service is when hackers
overwhelm a website with too many

requests. We call it a distributed
denial-of-service when the attack comes from many

computers all at once.

Most websites are ready to respond to
millions of requests a day, but if you

hit them with billions or trillions of requests, coming from different places,

the computers are overloaded and stop
responding. Another trick used by

cybercriminals is to send large amounts of spam
email in an attempt to trick people

into sharing sensitive personal information.

This is called a phishing scam. A phishing scam is when you get what seems like a

trustworthy email asking you to log
into your account, but clicking the email

takes you to a fake website.

if you log in anyway you've been
tricked into giving your password away.

Hackers can then use your login
credentials to access your real accounts

to steal information or maybe even to
steal your money. Fortunately there are

many companies, laws, and government
organizations working to make the

internet safer, but these efforts are
not enough.

You may think when a computer system
gets hacked the problem was the security

design or the software. Ninety percent
of the time the system gets hacked

however, it's not because of the security bug, but because of a simple mistake made by

a human. It turns out there are steps we
can all take to protect ourselves. Often

your actions not only impact the
security of your own data and computer, but the

security of everyone at your school,

workplace, and home. With billions or
trillions of dollars at stake

cybercriminals get smarter each year and
we all need to keep up.