Today’s Blog on Cyber Security by Guiding Guru … Mrs. Anshu Sharma, PGT-Computers Science

WHAT IS CYBER SECURITY?

Cybersecurity is the state of being safe in cyberspace, which includes taking precautions against attacks or illegal access to computer systems. It speaks of the procedures, technology, and policies in place to safeguard devices, networks, and data against cyberattacks and data breaches.

What is Cyber Crime?

Cyber Crime is any illegal activity or crime in which a computer is utilized as a tool, a target, or both. Or, to put it another way, cybercrimes in India encompass anything from denial-of-service assaults to online cracking and are defined as any unapproved access to a computer system without the consent of the system's legitimate owner or location of illegal activity.

Phishing, spoofing, denial-of-service attacks, credit card fraud, online transaction fraud, cyber defamation, child pornography, etc. are a few instances of cybercrime.

Cybercriminals consistently select quick and easy ways to profit greatly. They go after wealthy individuals or wealthy establishments such as casinos, banks, and financial corporations where large sums of money are transacted.

The intention behind cyberattacks may be:

Unauthorized or illegal access to data: Hackers try to alter or remove data through unapproved access.
Extortion: By obtaining unauthorized access to the victim's private and sensitive information, hackers threaten to harm them in return for cash or a ransom.

Injure the Competition's firm: In order to do harm to a competitor's firm, hackers steal trade secrets or other important data, such as intellectual property that is highly valuable on the black market. The business may lose its exclusive advantage if these trade secrets become known, which would have an impact on its profitability.

Disrupt Business Activity: One common goal of hackers is to interfere with an organization's regular business operations.

Reputational damage: Customers start to lose faith in a business as a result of a breach.

The significance of cyber security in today’s digital age cannot be understated. A single security breach has severe consequences in today’s interconnected world, resulting in heavy financial losses and data loss, as well as hurting its reputation.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF CYBER CRIMES

1. Unauthorized Access and Hacking:

Any type of access without the consent of the legitimate owner or the person in control of the computer, computer system, or computer network is referred to as unauthorized access. An unauthorized entry into a computer system or network is referred to as hacking. Hacking is any action taken with the intention of breaking into a computer or network. Hackers attack the target computer by writing their own programs or by using pre-made ones. They are driven to destroy, and they derive pleasure from doing so. Some hackers commit financial crimes for their own financial benefit. Examples of these crimes include credit card fraud and money transfers from multiple bank accounts to their own account for subsequent cash withdrawals. The websites that hackers most frequently target are those run by governments.

2. Hacking of websites:

Taking over someone else's website with force is known as web hacking. In this instance, the website owner forfeits authority over the content of his online presence.

3 Pornography:

Pornography is defined as the display of sexual activity intended to arouse sexual desire. Pornographic websites, computer-produced pornographic periodicals, and online pornography accessed through mobile devices are all included in the definition of pornography.

4 Child Pornography:

Children are being sexually abused via the Internet in large numbers. It is possible for youngsters to become victim to cybercrime. Since computers and the internet are now necessities in every home, children have easy access to it. Pornographic content is easily accessible on the internet. Pedophiles try to meet youngsters for sex or snap pictures of them in their underwear, sometimes even engaging in sexual poses, after luring them in with pornographic material. Pedophiles occasionally pose as teenagers or kids their own age to approach youngsters in chat rooms, after which they start to get to know them better and gain their trust. Next, gradually, pedophiles engage in sexual conversation to assist kids in overcoming their shyness around.

How do they function?

Pedophiles ensnare youngsters and teenagers by adopting false identities.
Pedophiles engage in conversations with minors through a variety of chat rooms that the minors utilize to communicate with one another.
Make the child/teen your friend.
Gain the trust of the youngster or teenager in order to obtain personal information from them.
obtains the child's or teen's email account and begins reaching out to people using the victim's email address.
begins sending the victim explicit texts and photographs, including those of children, in an attempt to help him overcome his inhibitions and give the impression that what is being done to him is commonplace and that everyone does it.

5. Cyber Stalking:

Stalking is generally understood to refer to a pattern of persistent acts of harassment directed at the victim, such as following them, calling them incessantly, murdering their pet, damaging their property, or leaving notes or things behind. Severe violent crimes, such physically harming the victim, can occur after stalking. When a cybercriminal repeatedly uses online resources to harass or threaten a victim, this is known as cyberstalking. Aiming to control the victim's life, both online and offline stalkers share this trait.

How do cyberstalkers go about things?

All of the victim's personal information is gathered, including name, family history, phone numbers for both the victim's home and workplace, daily schedule, address for both, date of birth, and so on. This information is easily obtained by the stalker if he is one of the victim's acquaintances. If the stalker is not acquainted with the victim, he gathers information from online sources, including profiles that the victim may have created when creating a chat or email account, or when creating an account on a particular website.

The stalker may publish this information on any sex-services or dating service website by pretending to be the victim and inviting them to have sexual services.

When people from all around the world discover this information, they begin phoning the victim at home or at work and requesting relationships or sexual services.
Some stalkers set up the victim's email account on numerous pornographic and sex websites, which causes the victim to start getting these kinds of unsolicited emails.
Certain stalkers repeatedly write emails to their target, requesting different kinds of favors or threatening them.

In cyberstalking, the harasser may enlist the help of a third party to torment the target.

6. Denial of service Attack:

In this attack, the perpetrator overloads the victim's network with traffic or overflows his email account with unsolicited messages, depriving him of the services he is legally authorized to receive or offer. The goal of this type of attack is to overload the network with pointless traffic in order to cause it to crash. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are another variation on the standard denial of service attack, in which a large number of attackers are dispersed geographically. Numerous denial-of-service attacks, like the Teardrop and Ping of Death assaults, take advantage of flaws in the TCp/IP protocols. System administrators can install software updates for all known DoS attacks to reduce the damage they inflict.

7. Phishing:
Sending an email purporting to be a reputable company with the goal of tricking the recipient into providing personal information that could be exploited to steal their identity is known as phishing. The email instructs the recipient to go to a website and update details about themselves, including bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and social security numbers, which are already in the legal organization's possession. Yet the website is fraudulent, created purely to obtain personal data from users. The phisher anticipated that a portion of the recipients of the mass-spammed emails would be those who had genuinely provided their credit card data.

8 Online Gambling :

Online gambling is available on millions of websites, all of which are hosted on foreign servers. It's actually thought that a large number of these websites are fronts for money laundering. There have been documented cases of online money laundering and hawala transactions.

9 Cyber Defamation:

This is the publishing of disparaging material about another individual on the internet or sending emails to all of that person's acquaintances with disparaging remarks about each other.