Blog 3 Topic 1 cont. - Preventing cyber prime

One of the biggest threats we face today in internet crime is the existence of hackers and and phishing gangs. These criminals can wreak all kinds of havoc on the internet; individual non professional hackers may be aiming just to troll others and attack people on an individual personal level, however, most professional hackers are in it for financial gain. They can work independently or in groups, and these people often rely on the fact that many individuals do not understand the concepts of phishing or cyber hacking of their finances. If they are skilled enough, they are also capable of large scale heists, such as the one that made global headlines in 2005 when their was a £220m heist committed against the Sumitomo Bank in London (https://doi.org/10.1016/S1353-4858(05)70291-9) . These occurrences are leading people to mistrust the internet with their personal information and financial resources. If I were to rule the internet, however, I would make it a requirement that before you were granted access to the internet, you would have to take an educational course that would help people identify different tactics of cyber crime such as phishing, malware and and pharming tactics to help prevent these crimes from happening. This education would come about in the form of breaking down these various types of internet attacks. For example, an internet phishing attack would be identified by its 4 stages: the preparation where the criminals obtain domain names & hijack computers, the attack initiation where large amounts of spam are sent in a short amount of time, the discovery of the attack the victim and their report of it (although often times too late), and the takedown of the fraudulent site, often being dragged out to hook more people. There would also be a breakdown of malware and how to identify different way hackers try to get you to download them, as well as how to avoid being pharmed. (https://doi.org/10.1016/S1353-4858(05)70291-9). The unfortunate drawback, though, is that cyber crime is always evolving, and even with proper education and consistent preparation, people can still fall victims to their tactics. To help prevent this, international laws will be put into place to help enforce this implementation of required education on cyber crime, and along with this forced education will be much stricter laws and harsher punishments on cyber hacking to discourage people from attempting it. This idea reflects the proposed Council of Europe Draft Convention on Cyber-crime, which is currently going through its stages towards implementation (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0267-3649(00)05008-1). Hopefully, soon in real life we will be able to implement security measures, both personally and though law, that will allow us to utilize the internet without fear of hackers.