A FEW weeks ago, the Mandaue Chamber of Commerce and Industry held an industry forum focusing on cybersecurity and it was great to see that there was a lot of interest.
This is a big topic nowadays. The other week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies came out with a study that cybercrime may be as big as $600 billion worldwide. It said that crime nowadays, especially those online, is now more efficient, less risky, and way easier and profitable to execute.
The question that was foremost on people’s minds during the forum was relatively straightforward – we know that there are scams, we know that people, especially celebrities are blackmailed for money, because their nude or compromising sex photos are hijacked, and they have to pay. And there is credit card fraud. But who would be interested in me? I don’t have lots of money, nor do I have anything compromising.
Fair enough. The number one growing tool for digital crooks right now, and easy to do and profitable is ransomware. This is the software that somehow gets to infect your mobile phone or computer, and locks up your files or encrypts them so that you cannot use it, and then they demand a ransom payment in exchange for the code to decrypt the files so that you could use it again.
This is becoming popular because its quite difficult to apprehend the hackers and it is easy to have large scale outbreaks. In May 2017, the ransomware Wanna Cry reportedly infected at least 200,000 computers in 150 countries including hospitals, banks, telcos and many different businesses. And then in June, there was the Petya. Can you imagine that each business will pay a few hundred or a few thousand dollars just for a password to unlock the files again? And if most payments are through bitcoin or cryptocurrency, it would be hard to track or trace, or even apprehend.
Is this common? According to Malwarebytes, 35 percent of small and medium sized business in 2017 in the United States had experienced a ransomware attack, and 66 percent of them suffered a data breach.
You might think that it won’t hit you because creating ransomware is a highly technical skill. It is not. There are hundreds of websites available all over the world that can help abet this criminality by helping you create ransomware even if you are not technical. So, its best to be always careful, and don’t go to unsecured websites, or click on emails that you are not sure of.