Cyber Security

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting computer systems, networks, and electronic devices from unauthorized access, theft, damage, or disruption. It encompasses a range of measures and technologies designed to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats, including viruses, malware, phishing attacks, and other forms of cybercrime.

Some common cybersecurity measures include:

Cyber Security Cyber Crime

What is Cyber Crime? Just like regular crime, it also exists on the Internet. Here are some examples of Cyber Crime:

• Identity Theft
• Online Predators
• BEC ("Business Email Compromise")
• Ransomware
• Stealing of sensitive intellectual property

Increasing Crime

Cyber Crime has been increasing regularly every year. Why is Cyber Crime on the rise? Here are some reasons:

• Cyber Crime is easy to accomplish
• Low risks of getting caught
• For little work there is often high returns
• Attackers can target thousands of victims
• Money laundering is easier with Cryptocurrencies

Challenges like identity theft can have significant consequences on an individual, causing not only the potential of financial losses but also a lot of personal grief.

The Internet offers many services to facilitate money laundering, usually making it a trivial process. As money is exchanged in cryptocurrency, services such as tumblers make it hard to track the money.

Tumblers are services that split up cryptocurrency transactions and forward the money through many accounts, with different values, for thousands of people, making them hard to track.

Cyber Criminals

Who are Cyber Criminals? It can be anyone, but let us discuss some common ones we see in the media all the time:

• State-sponsored groups targeting organizations in other countries
• Hacking Groups out to target companies to make them pay ransom
• Kids in their rooms doing illegal hacking

Catching Cyber Criminals

Cyber Criminals can stay anonymous with trivial means, and typically easy to avoid getting caught. When attackers do get caught, it is often because of mistakes made by the attackers themselves, for example, as a result of becoming complacent. There is also a great deal of potential for law enforcement to use caught cybercriminals to rat out others in the industry.

Law enforcement do, however, have many challenges in tracking down cyber-crime. You might see attack traffic coming in from a system residing in the UK, and when taking down this system, you realize it was being remotely controlled by, e.g., another system in India. Cooperating with law enforcement across borders, you might be able to get to the system in India, but only to realize it was again remotely controlled through, e.g., Pakistan.

Cyber Security Money Making Threats

Driven by Money

There are a few key threats organizations face frequently:

• Ransomware files and systems are encrypted with attackers' keys, and they demand you to pay money to get your data back.
• Cryptocurrency miners; your systems are infected with a low-profile cryptocurrency mining tool. This tool uses the CPU to try to make money on a cryptocurrency for the attackers.
• BEC ("Business Email Compromise"). Users get hacked through all sorts of methods and their emails are compromised. Via email compromise, the attackers can intercept communications, for example, an invoice, and try to redirect payments to other banks and accounts.

There are plenty of ways of making money for cybercriminals, which attracts people and interest.

Value and Power

There is value and power in many things related to IT, for example:

• Bandwidth can be used to pressure businesses by targeting them with DDOS ("Distributed Denial of Service") attacks.
• Hacked systems may have sensitive information worth money, for example, business proprietary information, online gaming assets, sensitive photographs, and pictures.
• Attackers can install themselves in browsers and try to hijack the online banking use.

The potential for criminals to make significant amounts of money within the cyber domain causes more and more criminal gangs and other opportunists to join in on the action and make our lives much harder.

Threatening for Money

Another common attack cybercriminals perform to make money is the act of extortion, that is holding individuals hostage based on information they have on an individual, trying to make them pay money to be released from the extortion attempt. Consider the following common scenario:

• A person meets up with someone online, the other party is actually a scam artist trying to trick the victim.
• They engage in interesting conversations and seem to make an immediate deep bond between one another.
• They might even engage in video conversations, but the scam artist is, for example, using recorded video or simply has an excuse for not being able to activate their microphone or web-camera.
• One thing might lead to another and the relationship could turn sexual. The scam artist tries to convince the victim in giving up personal pictures and recordings of themselves, likely in compromising situations.
• Once the scam artist receives this material, perhaps even returning fake pictures of innocent people in similar situations, the extortion begins.
• The scam artist can now threaten to release the compromising material to family members, co-workers, and others, offering to delete the material if a sum of money is paid into the scam artist's account.

Cyber Security Dark Web

The Dark Web

The Dark Web (also called The Dark Net) is a network within the Internet that is only accessible using certain software and protocols.

The Dark Web has many names, for example, Tor Network or Onion Router.

Anyone can access the Dark Web by simply downloading software for it. A popular and very much used browser is the Tor Project's Tor Browser

This is just like any other browser such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, except it can also access special website addresses which ends in .onion instead of .com and such.

Any traffic sent through Tor Browser is automatically anonymized and encrypted via many different hosts. The browser also has built-in protection for many kinds of tracking and de-anonymization features.

Accessing The Dark Web

You can access many fun and interesting websites through this browser, also many which co-exist on the regular Internet. For example, if you access the following URLs in Tor Browser, your communications will be fully encrypted and anonymized inside the Dark Web:

Because of the built-in anonymizing features and encryption, the Dark Net is also a host of many criminal websites, marketplaces, and networks.

Note: Please take care when navigating the Dark Net. The links above will only work when using the appropriate software.