Cyber crime is becoming a major problem in our world controlled by computers. The worst part is, our world is only going to become more and more controlled by computers, not the other way around. With our growing reliance on technology and cyber attackers getting better at hacking, should consumers be worried? One of Google’s security experts gave his opinion on the matter to Business Insider.
His name is Justin Schuh and he certainly is no stranger when it comes to computer security. Before Justin was hired by Google to work on Chrome security back in 2009, Justin worked at a couple of other technology companies. He was part of IBM and the NSA, both of which he also played a role in security. What he says about the current state of cyber crime is that “attackers are getting better because there is money behind it – the motivation to succeed isn’t just personal gratification.” Before, cyber attacks were not monetary endeavours but rather focused on drawing the public’s attention to exploits so that they would be fixed by companies. Sure, there were some hackers who did what they did for money, but there were far less than there are today.
Today, Justin says that the main type of cyber attacks are either denial of service attacks or spam attacks. He also makes another reference to the much more monetary focused side of hacking these days by saying, “Now, a lot of computer crime is very big business,” and that “People are trying to build up large botnets.” Modern hackers really have turned hacking into its own industry and this is by no means a good thing.
An example of some cyber crime that takes place today is bad third-party Chrome extensions, something that Justin is all too aware of. He even went as far as to warn users to always be on the look out for these Chrome extensions and plug-ins as they can be very harmful to users personal data and computer. He says that all too often uses get tricked into downloading these malicious extensions and plug-ins, even when Chrome advises them against doing so.
This article isn’t all bad news though, while money getting poured into hacking and cyber crime is on the rise, so is money to fight it. Last year a whopping $71.1 billion was spent on information security. This year that number is expected to increase to around $77 billion, an increase of over 8%.