Internet Piracy

It makes me quite nervous to realize that most of our personal, financial and social information is stored in some database somewhere. What makes me more nervous is that there are people that can hack into these databases and access all of your personal information from the safety of their own home. You can google pretty much anybody's name these days and find out where they live and information about them. The convenience of the Internet definitely comes with some vulnerability issues with the storage and access of personal information.

Every time somebody finds a way to hack into someone's information, there is a team of people who are in control of the security of this information that add a provision to their system to avoid that same hack. This just gives hackers another challenge to overcome and often allows room for another hack to be successful. Since the internet is just code written by people, I feel that there is always away to rewrite the code. I mean let's face it, has internet piracy gone away? No. How long has it been a problem? A very long time. So will it ever end? Or will criminals just keep getting smarter and smarter?

One method to eliminate the stealing of personal information over the internet is to hire the people that stole it in the first place. The government is hiring hackers to work for them to help expose flaws in their systems and help to stop people from being able to access information. Read all about it in this article:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/21/cybersecurity-students-hackers-technology-security-cybersecurity.html

This scares me even more. Hacking has become such a big problem that the only way we can stop it is to ask the hackers for their help? Come on now. If I were you, I would stick to shopping in stores and keeping your information as private as humanly possible before you're the one getting hacked.

As my dad has just had some purchases made on his credit card that weren’t his, and one of his employees just had his identity stolen, Internet privacy is definitely something that is on my mind. Neither my dad nor his employee Mike have any idea of how their information was stolen, a fact, that is quite troubling. A very possible answer is that they had their information copied via the Internet.

While browsing the Internet, I found that identity theft is increasing every year, and in 2008 over 10 million people were affected. Credit card fraud is the largest type of identity theft, taking up 26% of identity theft. As identity theft is increasingly becoming more popular, people have to be more weary when using the Internet. As of 2009, the top ten security threats on the Internet according to TechRepublic were:

1. Social Networking As an Avenue of Attack

2. More Attacks on the Integrity of the Data

3. Attacks on mobile Devices

4. Virtualization

5. Cloud Computing

6. More Target Attacks on Non-Windows Operating Systems

7. Third-Party Applications

8. Side Effects of Green Computing

9. IP Convergence

10. Overconfidence

Out of these ten, I found number six to be the most frightening, as just buying my first Mac, I thought that I didn’t have to worry about viruses or being hacked, but apparently it is supposed to very easy to be hack into them. According to SPENDONLIFE.com, the reason why PCs get the most press for being attacked is that,

“Just as terrorists prefer to attack large gatherings of people where they can do the most damage, so do hackers prefer to write malware that will spread to the greatest number of computers — and that means Windows.”

Does this mean that I have to buy security for my computer?

If you unfortunately do find yourself a victim of identity theft like my father and Mike, there are four vital steps the Federal Trade Commission suggests that you take:

1. Place a fraud alert on your credit reports, and review your reports

2. Close the accounts that you know, or believe, have been tampered with or opened fraudulently

3. File a report with your local police or the police in the community where the identity theft took place

4. File a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission