How CyberCrime Works

Because of the exponential increase in the amount of people using the Internet, it has become more and more rewarding to be a cybercriminal. Vast amounts of Dollars are moved online amongst individuals and corporations everyday, its a huge industry and the stage is set for the larger players to come and play - The organized crime. No longer is the lone wicked computer programmer the leading hazard around. The top crime bosses swiftly realized the financial prospect that's before them and so they grabbed it. At present organized crime is way more sophisticated than we're used to see on television. They hire hackers, they have scam websites and even Research and development teams that constantly try to develop the next best way to steal cash.
Here are several statistics from Symantec concerning the scale of cybercrime.

There are 556 Million cyber crime victims a year(156 Million a day!).
The worldwide cost of cybercrime is 110 Billion Dollars.
2/3 of online adults have been victims of cyber crimes sometime in their lifetime.

Malware

Classification: Malware is general term used to refer to a malicious application or script. Malware can be, a Virus, a worm (much like a virus, but with somewhat different properties) a Trojan horse or a rootkit.Trojans are programs that specialize in taking control of the infected computer and Rootkits are the concealment experts, specializing in embedding themselves in machines and hiding numerous mischievous processes from the user.

How can we get infected: To get infected by Viruses, Trojans and Rootkits the user performs some action. We either accidentally download them or someone sends them to us. The second we try to open the malware file, our complete system gets infected. The malware can be attached to a normal software. After the infected file is opened, the malware hides itself inside the operating system. From this moment on, the malware has a substantial amount of control over our system, depending on the complexity of the malware.

Botnets

Botnets is a terrifying problem. A botnet is a massive band of machines controlled by online hackers remotely. First the computers are infected by Malware which the user runs by accident, once the computer is infected it becomes a "zombie". The zombie attempts to create connection with their controller, the master of the malware. The zombies become slaves, they're under the complete control of their operator. Hackers can harvest the power of the botnet in numerous ways in an effort to earn a good profit. They mainly utilize zombies to send spam to huge numbers of people. We're dealing with BILLIONS of spam emails each day! An additional widespread use of botnets is what's termed as a Distributed Denial Of Service attack or "DDOS attack". DDOS occurs when the hacker that's manipulating the zombies, tells them to try and take down a website, online service or routing equipment. This can be done by ordering the zombies to create an incredible number of connections to the targets which the operator decides on, rendering them unreachable for legitimate users.

Cybercrime earns its money from botnets by renting out command over their botnets to clients in the blackmarket.

Despite the fact that anti virus programs usually can detect the botnet malware, many people are not aware of this issue and don't secure their computers properly. Can you imagine having your pc at home turning into a zombie and having it be a part of all sorts of illegal cyber crime or cyber warfare activities around the globe? This is definitely a frightening thought...

Fraud

Fraud has been around since the beginning of mankind, however the internet made it easier for fraud evolve into a whole new level. The key objective of the frauders that lurk on the web is simple: Acquire as much personal data about as many individuals as possible. They'll use a wide variety of methods, some of the most common ones originate from the spam that the botnets send. The email typically says something about a cash winning prize that's waiting for you if enter your personal information. Sometimes it contains a link to a website that pretends to be a web site you trust, hoping to steal your information as soon as you submit this data to the fake website. The phony website scam is named "Phishing", and it's seriously popular at present. The primary lesson to adopt from this is that you should pay extra attention to the websites that you're browsing, especially if you're submitting your personal information. for example frauders want to use URLs like myspace.shop.co instead of.com original name in an attempt to trick people. Avoiding this is easy, simply take a look at the URL and ensure it's legit.

There are lots of scams and techniques to take advantage of people out there. Be sensible! Don't give up your personal details to something that appears to be suspicious.

So to conclude, the cybercrime process works like so: Hackers develop Malware. Malware creates botnets and botnets generate spam and with spam more information is stolen from people. The spam can also help spread some more malware which further expands botnets. The personal info that is robbed from people might be sold in black markets and each kind of information has a value, for instance a credit card number could possibly be worth X amount of Dollars and a Facebook account name + password might be worth Y Dollars.

Cyber crime is a continuously growing industry.The hacker's methods become more and more innovative as time goes on. We need to be aware of the hazards if we'd like to avoid becoming the next victims.