For Just $325, Anyone Can Become a Data Thief
After recent hacking activities stole 68,000 log-ins from people around the world, online account users need to be aware of the fact that daily online threats never go away. Whether your an amateur or an expert, data theft is becoming easier, cheaper and more and more commonplace.
For a mere $25, a criminal can employ a spamming specialist who will tempt 250,000 Internet users via email to click on a fraudulent link. A user’s PC is then corrupted by ZeuS, a common hacking tool used by criminals. The most frightening part here is that older, but still usable versions of ZeuS are even free, and are able to gather all the log-ins saved by cookies on an infiltrated PC. Using the rest of the $325 budget, a criminal can then rent an Internet-connected server to harvest and squirrel the accumulated log-ins.
So next time you want to use the same username and password for multiple online accounts, you should seriously reconsider, since so far, most corporations are far from close to stopping these hacking schemes.
According to Phil Neray, vice president of security strategy at IBM’s Guardium subsidiary, “Most organizations do not have the continuous, real-time monitoring in place to detect this type of activity.”
(Via USA Today)
