As we move more of our lives to the digital space, cybercrime becomes more of a threat. This includes the theft of personal data, credit card information, or images of your anatomy you thought were safe.
Juniper Research, a leader in market analysis, suggests cybercrime will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1-trillion globally by 2019. This amount is more than four times the estimate of 2015.
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According to recent research, most breaches will come from existing IT and network infrastructure. New threats are set to target mobile devices at an increasing rate though the number of infected mobile devices is still dwarfed by that of traditional PC systems. It is estimated that 60% of anticipated data breaches will occur in North America.https://memeburn.com/wp-admin/edit.php
Hacktivism — the act of hacking systems for political reasons — has slowed down of late, though Juniper expects fewer, more precise attacks in the future.
An increase in professional cybercrime comes from the sale of emerging cybercrime products, such as malware. These programs are created to infect systems and gather information for the attacker.
In recent years, Sony has been a prime target for hackers. In 2011, a large-scale attack brought down Sony’s PlayStation Network. Thereafter Sony took the service offline in order to strengthen its security. It was later revealed over 77 million user accounts had been compromised. Sony was again attacked in 2014, this time its Sony Pictures Entertainment being the target. A hacker group calling themselves “Guardians of Peace” (GOP) began to release private information stolen from Sony, and demanded the cancellation of an unreleased movie from the studio, The Interview.
In an interview with John Oliver, Edward Snowden recommends strengthening user passwords in order to help combat cybercrime.
Bad passwords are one of the easiest ways to compromise a system. For somebody who has a very common 8-character password it can literally take less than a second for a computer to go through the possibilities and pull that password out.
When asked about the strength of different passwords, Snowden commented on how to create a stronger password:
I think the best advice here is to shift your thinking from passwords to passphrases. Think about a common phrase that works for you that’s too long to brute force and also make them unlikely to be in the dictionary.
It can actually be a lot harder to remember a password they [companies] say has to be 13-characters long or something like that. Has to have exclamation points. It has to have numbers. It has to have uppercase and lowercase letters and things like that than it is to remember a simple phrase like margaretthatcheris110%SEXY.
