Michael Wiedner
Mr Squier
APLANG
11-22-16


Witty Title


	Every morning you’re awoken by your alarm clock, then shuffle your way to your iPad to read the news, then smack a few buttons on your electric coffee maker, then go onto Amazon to purchase that Turkish candy bar you saw in a YouTube video the night before, then jump into your car with your bluetooth-connected playlist rumbling the vehicle, then stomp into your office cubicle to make spreadsheets with Excel about corporate data, constantly staring into your Apple Watch praying for those seconds to chip away faster, then recall to the house to lay in bed so you can finally watch that documentary on the migration patterns of pandas in the Sichuan province. Most people in modern society’s daily routines do not branch off far from this cage of electronic integration. According to an article in CNN, the average American spends over 10 hours per day staring at pixels. Electronic devices in all of their forms have become an essential part of life. They make us coffee, they entertain us, they house our bank accounts and all other forms of private information. When one contemplates all of the things we have in our computers, phones, tablets, and in the cloud, you need to consider how secure it is. How difficult is it to view all of this private information? Can anybody view it now? Who would be accessing it? What could somebody gain from tapping into computer? A plethora of questions arise which a surprisingly small amount of people can answer.
	The concept of online privacy is straight out of George Orwell’s prophetic mind.  If some hacker managed to slip through the firewalls straight into your “private” databases, they could understand every little bit and piece of your personal life. Family photos, credit card information, social security numbers, browser history, geolocation, social media account information, and email account access are just a few of the morsels of information that would be right at that hacker’s fingertips. Now surely you must be thinking, “Hacking into my computer must be virtually impossible. If it wasn’t, I’d probably be broke and kidnapped by now.” While it is extremely difficult and expensive to fully tap into a private computer, other parts of your private information cannot boast the same elusiveness. An ip address is a unique string of numbers that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network. If one can get access to a user’s ip address, then their rough geolocation can be revealed. It can reveal the country and city that you live in, but that is about it. The part of ip addresses that is spooky is how simple it is to get a user’s. An ip address can be retrieved in a number of ways, but one of the most popular and most simplistic is just to get their Skype username. Yes, if somebody knows your Skype username, they know what city you live in. In addition to geolocation, and ip address can be used in a more complicated and evil manner known as a DDoS attack. DDoS is an acronym that stands for Distributed Denial of Services. The way a DDoS attack works is a user or group of users will attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources, which congests the connection and makes it run very slowly if it runs at all. DDoS attacks will almost never target a family’s basic Comcast internet connection, but typically the entire provider’s domain. On October 21, 2016, one of the largest DDoS attacks targeted the servers of the company Dyn, which controls much of the internet’s domain name system infrastructure. The attack brought down many behemoth-like websites such as Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, and CNN. It took the company the entire day to fully recover from the strain of the attack. A hacker can completely bring down an internet plane, and all he needs is your Skype name.
	Today, everything that can possibly be online is online. Everything from a bank account to private family photos to personal medical data to credit card information can be accessed via a computer, and if it’s online, it can probably be hacked. However, since hacking is a major federal crime, not to mention incredibly difficult, the average Joe’s bank account is far less likely to be targeted than a multi-billion dollar corporation, but it does happen. Identity theft has become a major issue in the United States. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2014, 17.6 million citizens experienced some degree of identity theft, which is about 7% of the population aged 16 or older, but LifeLock.com, one of many identity theft protection services, says that 1 in 4 people have experienced it. Identity theft is the misuse of one’s personal information for the thief's gain. If your identity is successfully stolen, the thief can make purchases on your account, use your information in order to gain government benefits, or to provide false information to a police officer. All of these events can lead the victim to being falsely accused of offenses they never committed or to a smaller bank account. Identity theft can happen in several ways. Bills, checks, and mail stolen from your mailbox, data breaches, real-life dumpster-diving, hacked shopping sites that save information, and phishy emails, which are emails that are supposed to look like legitimate emails from the government or a bank provider that ask for all of your private information in order to steal from you, are all possible routes to identity theft. Although identity theft is preventable, it isn’t very easy. Many services such as LifeLock boast that they can prevent and stop identity theft from occurring to you, but it isn’t cheap. LifeLock Ultimate Plus™ racks in at $30 per month. In addition to a membership to an identity theft prevention service, one easy way to help prevent the severity identity theft can bring is to use credit cards instead of debit cards. Doing this makes it so thieves are stealing from the bank’s funds, instead of your own. Also, most credit cards limit your liability to $50 and will often cover the entire loss, whereas debit card thieves have an open season. Identity theft is a major issue that one should attempt to prevent, if it has not happened already.
In addition to identity theft, another common method of stealing information and therefore money from unsuspecting individuals is computer viruses. A computer virus is an incredibly complicated piece of software with a number of purposes. A computer virus can take control of your computer and force it to perform certain tasks, to cripple a computer and make it perform agonizingly slowly, or, of course, to steal information. A hacker with the access to a group of computers acquired via a computer virus can make the infected computers execute several tasks for their master. These tasks include mining for bitcoins, which is a complicated process that involves using a computer’s processor and graphics card to solve algorithms in order to create the virtual currency known as bitcoins and to use the infected computers in DDoS attacks. The computer viruses can also steal information, especially credit card numbers and passwords by using keyloggers, which are programs that will record whatever the user types, including passwords, emails, and private messages. The information stolen via the keyloggers can be used for identity theft purposes. The final use of computer viruses, forcing a computer or its network to run slowly, is pretty much only used to be cruel.
Fortunately, a computer virus is much easier to prevent than an identity pilferage. In order to prevent malicious software, more commonly referred to as malware, the user needs to keep a keen eye when traveling to less secure parts of the internet. One should always be skeptical of: advertisements, especially those that offer free items, “DOWNLOAD NOW” buttons (always check to see if any more specific buttons exist; “Click here to download Skype” is going to be much safer than the large “DOWNLOAD NOW” button), foreign websites, and unknown and shortened URLs. Also, some programs will force you to agree to their terms and conditions or EULA (End User License Agreement) during the program’s installation, but often times, they’ll slip an extra malicious file into the webbings of their fine print. In addition to all of the suspicious content to avoid online, one can install an adblocker onto their browser which completely removes almost all advertisements, malicious included, from almost all websites.
If one unfortunately fails to prevent a virus from plaguing their computer or encounters a virus from an alternate source, then it is still possible to cure the computer because computer viruses, just like real diseases, can have detectable symptoms. If your computer is suddenly running very slowly, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s infected. If Gmail suddenly sends you an email saying that your account was accessed from a new device then you can suspect that a computer virus has keylogged your password and used it to log into the email account. Unless you are a seasoned expert with every single programming language ever created and have an absurd knowledge of the behavior of computer viruses, you will need some virus protection software to remove a virus from your hard drive. Hundreds upon hundreds of anti-malware softwares exist online. Some of the services are free, and some are not. However, when selecting an antivirus program, one must be extremely careful. Fake antivirus programs are, ironically, one of the most common forms of delivering viruses to a host. In order to find a safe and effective software, one should perform excessive research and make absolutely sure that you are downloading it from the proper source and not from a phishy website. If you can follow the steps to avoid malicious content from spawning on your computer, then your odds of identity theft and of some Russian man on a laptop shuffling through your vacation photos have drastically decreased, and a more safe and secure online experience is achieved.
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