Why cyber security is important for our online safety?

While leaving our house, we lock our doors and windows carefully. Although, it wouldn’t prevent a burglar from gaining entry, yet it would make his job more difficult. There are definite chances that he will go elsewhere and try to enter someone else’s property.

Same is the case with cyber security. If the attacker is skilled and sufficiently equipped, he would eventually succeed in gaining access to pour data. However, the financial constraints will make it difficult or impossible to repel him, so our target should not be to make 100% sure that he is not able to achieve it. Rather we should try to make his job so difficult that he goes somewhere else.

When we visit a website, data is transmitted between the client and server and it allows us to interact with others and access website content like web pages and perform specific functions like file sharing, online games and so on. While doing this, there are some common online threats which we may face like personal safety issues, information security issues, computer threats and content issues.

Traditionally, cyber attacks had been done by the criminals for variety of reasons. Some hackers like to test their expertise against a system and share their success stories with others on dark web. Others do it purely for money. For example, a Russian hacker group Evil Corp is believed to have stolen over $100 million from people all around the world. There are some hackers who do it for good reasons. They find security gaps in company’s network so that steps should be taken to fix it before any series threat.

In 2013, the famous department store chain Target was breached and credit and debit card information of around 40 million customers and their contact information was stolen. This breach happened through Target’s HVAC system. Target allowed remote access to their HVAC system to monitor energy consumption, temperature and to perform maintenance. When this system was set up, it was not cordoned off from Target’s payment system and it resulted in data breach.

On 12th May 2017 morning, an innocent computer user opened an email which contained an attachment. When he opened the attachment, a ransomware downloaded onto his system. Ransomware is usually a computer code which is designed to encrypt system data on a hard drive. It can be only decoded by the hacker once his demands are fulfilled. This was termed as most devastating attack of the year and was named as WannaCry attack. In this attack, all the private information of the user including pictures, bank records, games, videos and everything is completely scrambled.

This attack began to spread all around the world like wildfire. Spanish telecom company Telefonica first got affected and reported that its multiple staff were locked out of their computers. Same day, UK’s National Health Service (NHS) reported that its 80 out of 236 hospital trusts had their computers locked out. The payment systems of Chinese petrol stations was cut off. German railways lost control of their passenger information system and FedEx’s logistic operations were disrupted in United States.

The WannaCry virus had spread to 230,000 computers in 150 countries within hours. It was stopped by an analyst who discovered a kill switch which shut it down.

We don’t need to be computer expert to protect us from above security issues. What we need is to use the tools which are made by experts. There are number of hardware, setting, features and software which are available to prevent an attack and enhance our security.