Yes, You Are a Target!

Yes, you are a target. Now it doesn’t matter if you’re a large or small business anymore, or even a home user or if you work in the medical sector. Truth of the matter is, everyone is a target nowadays. iPhone users being exploited with over a billion phones being affected, e-commerce sites, hackers hiding credit card stealers, hackers going after healthcare facilities with ransomware during the coronavirus pandemic, large businesses being taken over through their VMware cloud infrastructures, ransomware targeting Mac users, hackers leaking information about police, school districts being hit by ransomware - everyone is now a target. Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation released the Internet Crime Complaint Centre - IC3 - “2019 Internet Crime Report” had this to say.

Across that one year, the number of cybercrime complaints from both individuals and business organisations reached a staggering 467,361. The total cost of those reported crimes was even more mind-boggling - in excess of $3.5 billion. And this was from a Forbes February 2020 article. Now that is a huge amount - in excess of $3.5 billion. And this is just crimes that were reported or discovered by the Internet Crime Complaint Centre. Now the truth of the matter is we’re all in this together. Doesn’t matter if you’re a large corporation, a small business, mobile user, home user, school, healthcare, or other essential services. Everyone is an equal target.

Now you might be thinking, well, why would a hacker target me - an individual user, a student - versus someone like a large bank or a large corporation like Apple or Microsoft? Well, the truth of the matter is hackers want everyone’s information. So an individual user hacker might target you for a number of things. They might go after your bank account. They might go after your password so they can compromise your accounts. They might try to get into your cloud services - take a look at the photos on there, or even on your phone, potentially blackmail you. They could take information that they learn about you and do a phishing or vishing scheme.

That’s where they call you up and say that something like, well, hey, this is your niece. This is your cousin or whatnot. I’m in jail. I need you to help me out. I need you to send money. That’s a pretty typical way that hackers or malicious people will go after individual users. And, of course, the large corporations, they generally want passwords, information, account information, things like that. Home users, same things. Schools and educations, we’ve seen ransomware where they’ll lock - encrypt the files. And they’ll say if you don’t pay x amount of money within this time, we’ll delete all the files and all your data. Same thing goes for home users and healthcare and whatnot. Everyone is a target, unfortunately.

And this is a growing and growing problem. It’s no longer hackers just going after large businesses. They’re going after everyone. And the more that we become connected, the more devices we have that connect to the internet– our phones, our IP cameras, our toys, and whatnot - we become a larger target. We need to be aware of this. We need to take a look at ways that we can help mitigate this. So wrapping up, cybercrime is on the rise. It’s continually growing. It’s been growing, the more that we’ve become connected. Everyone is vulnerable. Cybercrime is not an isolated issue. Everyone is a potential target. And, of course, cybercrime has a cost.

Falling victim to a cybercrime often carries expensive risk, and this is not always monetary risk. It could be damage to your reputation, damage to you. It can cause problems. It could lead to blackmail and whatnot. So we need to - again, we need to take care of this. We need to find ways to mitigate this and be smarter about how we handle our information and how we secure ourselves and our network. And that’s largely what this course is going to be about.

So in the next video, we’ll be taking a look at typical attacks against your network. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.