In addition to understand what usb-slurping and social manipulation is about, you should keep your PC updated on the security side. It has never been easier to be a hacker and get into your PC than now. . Standard recipe is easy, all you need to know is the IP address and services available on the victims computer and there you go. The computer can be relatively well updated; it does not matter to what you want to do now. Scan yourself to the IP address and then perform a scan of the ports on that IP address. The software you use contains a long list of vulnerabilities associated with the various ports, choose one of the vulnerabilities and press attack and there you are.. The attack is the easy part of the hacking, where you can navigate files, take screen dumps, log key strokes, and more, without the owner(s) of the attacked computer knows anything, because the computer has not given any signals that something is really wrong now.
We all say, well I do not have anything of interest on my computer anyway. It may be the case, but there are always someone with more evil plans than you think of that would like to use your computer for several purposes. For instance if someone has a grudge against you or your family, they might want to plant information or virus on your computer that makes the world like living hell to you. They can place things in your temp files and other relevant folders and put tracks of child **** for example. Then they will call authorities and the next thing you know, you have someone knocking on your door and wants to see what you have on your computer. Imagine the problems you will run into and all the hassle to just get out of that situation.
The hacker can get hold of the administrator password once he has entered your computer through hacking it. Through so called bruteforce, or wordbook attack a hacker can very easy guess himself to the password on any computer system. Youth with cell phones and memory sticks
A trend today is that youth takes into use tailor made Trojans to follow their friends or girl friends. As long as you have a Trojan generator that is a very simple program, it takes only a few keystrokes to make the Trojan file that can be sent to the victim. This is where the expression social manipulation comes into the picture, or social reengineering if you would like to call it that. By intricate and smart ways the victim is cheated to run the software you have made, and then you can access files, click their web camera, listen to the microphone, sniff to their msn traffic and so on, without the victim knows anything at all.
Hackers hijack your web camera
Adobe went out with a warning in October 2008 that hackers used so called click jacking to turn on the web camera and the microphone on victim’s computers without victims knowing it at all. They have called it a critical problem, the highest level of security threat the company use. It is the software Flash that is used for advertisement or other interactive fancy applications, that is vulnerable to this problem. It is present problem on all platforms. Luring people to visit evil web sites where hackers’ hijacks apparent innocent clicks that enable them to turn on equipment without the victims knowing it at all. Click jacking web browser problem hits all Adobe Flash Players microphone- and camera access setup.
Even if your operating system is updated, you can be in trouble if you have not updated all the other things you have on your computer. For instance if you click a link to a popular mp3 song, that was opened in a older version of Winamp software playlist. Despite you have a well updated Vista or XP operating system on your computer, your machine is hacked through this vulnerability. It is a new trend, people update their operating system and Microsoft Office software, but are very bad on updating their other applications, either its stand alone or just supporting software like flash, WinAmp etc. WinAmp is just lying there and works, so why should they worry by updating it? This enable the hacker to utilize security holes in older versions of WinAmp and the Trojan is in the computer even after the Winamp is closed, or even deleted from the computer.
Just to make it even scarier for you, as easy as you can hack a PC, you can hack a windows based Cell phone. Whatever you can do on a PC, you can do on a Windows Mobile or Symbian operating system.
And if you think you are safe when you are sitting on the airplane totally isolated from the internet, think again. This is were the USB slurping enters the arena. If a stranger just friendly enough asks whether he can charge his IPod through your USB port, be on guard. The concept USB slurping is very simple. A MP3 player, USB memory stick or equivalent can be put into the USB port and begins to grab data, or slurping the data from your computer onto the accessory connected to your USB port. It is done through a auto run program on the accessory put into your USB port. You will not notice the theft or installment of malicious software to your computer at all, unless you are extremely observant. So next time you are on a conference or on a travel with your laptop, and someone asks to borrow your computer for only as simple as power charging through the USB port, avoid by politely decline the suggestion. There is a simple solution to avoid this to happen if you want to be a friendly borrower to people in need, turn off the auto run function.
Antivirus is not everything, Regardless of how safe your system is, the problem occurs between the chair and the keyboard. We use internet for what it is worth and the question is whether we use our brain at the same time.
We have another issue to talk about, and that is when we are moving around, we have a tendency of forgetting various gadgets we carry around with us, and some of these gadgets have valuable information and sometimes very sensitive information that comes into wrong hands sometimes.
Things go very fast and sometimes there is not much time between glory and the downturn. The launch of Google Chrome is one example of this, where it was hailed into the skies when it came to the market, being user-friendly and speedy and the next week it came out lots of security warnings associated with this product, making it less of useful for the users.
It is no longer popular to send Trojans and viruses through the emails, this is the old fashioned way of spreading viruses on computer systems. The new thing is to include the viruses on well recognized net sites, with reputations of being solid and clean. This is done for instance through advertisements on the net pages. Adverts are using security holes like seen in Norway where the MSN.no page was infected with advertisements full of viruses and all users of this otherwise seen as a secure Microsoft web page, suddenly had their computers full of viruses, spread through these advertisements. This methodology is not captured yet by antivirus software, and is seen as yet another way of attacking computers. Malware which is the most normal virus to get through this methodology is malicious software which exploits especially the older versions of Flash software again. This software is common software used to animate advertisements and if you have entered a page with animated adverts and have a old version of flash, it is high likelihood you have got a malicious virus on your computer. That means that online newspapers are prone to this virus attack, and since the files are changing every fifth or tenth second, the antivirus will not catch it.
We all agree that antivirus software is important, but not regard it as you are 100% safe even with the most reputed antivirus software installed on your computer.
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