cybersecurity

People evolved with time and so did their desire to commit a crime.

You only need to go to social media applications to see how certain “keyboard warriors” do more than just venting out their anger and opinions. Hate speech is more common on social media than on any other platform. Because of their international nature, social media such as YouTube, Facebook and others do not follow the “free-speech” policy of the US. They claim to carefully curb such words but not always such words are punished. Verbal abuse on women, LGBT, racial and religious minorities and differently abled people have become exponential in such areas. And that’s just scratching the surface of humanity’s evil.

Turns out that these activities, however shameful, are not even seen as criminal acts but puerile acts. Social media has been used for worse crimes such as recruiting for foreign terror groups, hacking into personal accounts, even used to blackmail and manipulate people to commit the worst kind of actions.

After social media, we have many more evils that threaten to cause disharmony among the masses. These vary from hacking in severely protected areas to steal millions from multinational corporations. Today we will take a look at some of these threats that could rise in 2019.

#1. Sophisticated Phishing

People have a decent idea now what information to disclose and which not to. Digits pertaining to One-Time-Passwords, ATM pin, social security number, should never be disclosed over calls or emails.

But there is a trend that drafts and sends out convincing messages with the use of machine learning. People can usually believe these as real and disclose private information. This could be disastrous for people. Opening such information could help malicious or black hat hackers hack into personal information.

#2. State-Sponsored Attacks

State-Sponsored Attacks

Countries such as China, North Korea, Iran, Russia along with a few others have always been wrapped around the news for attempting to hack into strongly protected regions of other nations. The Russian involvement in the 2016 US presidential elections is a worldwide example.

There have been countless such incidents and the targets are usually billion dollar corporations or government institutions. According to Reuters, there has been a significant rise in state-sponsored cyber attacks, mainly of a financial nature since 2007.

To counteract these, the authorities usually opt for the services of an ethical hacker to defend these weak points.

#3. Online Kidnapping and Ransomware

Even if you cannot be physically pulled in the back of a mini-truck with a mask over your head on the web, but your identity can be. Every year, many cases have turned up in where a person’s identity is stolen.

In order to “return” back the identity, the kidnappers demand a huge sum of money. But then again, unlike the physical world, identity can be easily duplicated. So there is never an assurance that once they promise to return your identity safe, they have no backup copies of them. In that way, the victim will be paying more and getting nothing.

Usually, the rise of crypto-currencies is blamed for this.

#4. Driverless Cars

With the rise of technology and driverless cars, chances are these cars be hacked from any point. Since these cars are still used by a minuscule number of people, so there are no big risks. But with their expansion, this threat can become very real for more people. Not only will the hacker be gathering private data about residence and others but also put the life of the passenger at serious risk.

#5. IoT Attacks

With more things being connected to IoT, attacks can be more common. It is because, with so many devices connected to each other, hackers can develop many access points and attempt to hack into people’s devices. It could be cars, laptops or mobile devices.

Conclusion

To defend themselves, from these possible risks, they can learn a few tricks to defend their security system. There are many tutorials that teach them such as the “CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst CySA+ (CSA+). The Total Course” online tutorial which is taught by a former army intelligence personnel and includes 7 hours of video and 51 lectures explaining highly vital topics.

However, if you are a novice in cybersecurity, you can try for a beginner’s course such as the “Cyber Security For Normal People: Protect Yourself Online” which will teach you everything you need to know if you want to make the security stronger of your usual devices instead of advanced topics.