Am I the only one who’s getting creeped out by the increasingly sinister tone of the latest cyber threats making the rounds? Several news items from the past couple of days make me want to unplug my computer and forget I’d ever heard of the Internet.
It was revealed that most of the major Canadian banks, along with government and other financial institutions around the world, including many of the top Fortune 500 companies, have all been hit with the Mariposa worm. This carnivorous thing logs keystrokes and steals passwords and is apparently infecting more than 7,000 computers a day. But, according to Andrew Addison, a spokesman for the Canadian Bankers Association, Mariposa has not breached the sophisticated security systems in place to protect customers personal and financial information. Well that makes me feel better! If they really had “sophisticated security systems, how were they breached in the first place?
The next item is just plain vicious. A new Trojan was used to target several German banks that allowed cyber thieves to hack into and loot peoples bank accounts (okay, this isn’t new) but it goes a step further and rewrites the online balance to hide the theft. So if you’re looking at your bank account from an infected computer, you’re completely unaware that money is missing. A non-infected computer would show the actual depleted balance. I don’t think I’ll ever use online banking again.
The final item, reported on HostExploit, reveals various “physical “hacker activities that are too frightening to think about. It tells the story of a disgruntled ex-worker who hacked into a computer system that monitors off-shore oil rigs for potential leaks. Thankfully, his messing with the data didn’t cause any environmental damage. But the article also details the fact that a team of computer security researchers was able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker. It goes on to say that, They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researchers were hacking into a device in a laboratory. Now this story makes me want to crawl under the bed for cover.
But what does all this have to do with email security, you ask? Well the bottom line is that all these incidents occur because malware is designed to exploit not only computer software and hardware, but human behavior too. We’ve all opened file attachments out of curiosity. We’ve all clicked on links in messages from time to time or browsed sites that we probably shouldn’t have. And, most of us get pretty lazy and blast about securing our own computers because this stuff happens to other people. Botnets, zombies, Trojans, worms and all manner of insidious programs all thrive on these behaviors to propagate from one computer to the next, to the next, to the …
The entire world is connected electronically, and we are all responsible for keeping our own little corner of it as secure as possible.
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