Stealing you Blind in “Plain Sight”
Hacking may not be a spectator sport but it’s one of the fastest growing ones. Computer thieves are stealing us blind everyday while we’re in the safety of our own home or office. The warnings about computer data theft in public Wi-fi locations made consumers more cautious but the newest threats will come to you, wherever you may be.
What’s even scarier???? The thieves don’t have to be talented “hackers” anymore. All they have to do is get the program—that’s right, you can purchase a hacking program as easy to use as Windows which will do the work for you with a couple of clicks.
Brian Krebs, on staff with the Washington Post, writes an in-depth review of this serious problem in his article, Hacking Made Easy. Thieves are able to gather huge quantities of information through keylogging trackers and other malicious data miners. Once the data is captured, the thieves can patiently sift, pick and choose what they want and how they want to exploit it.
The best protection, as noted in Kreb’s article, is to maintain the same “safe-computing” rules that have applied since the first outbreak of computer viruses,
Stay up to date on security patches and be extremely wary of clicking on links and attachments that arrive unbidden in instant messages and e-mail.