How The Digital World Can Lead to a New Type of Terrorism

Introduction

I like technology especially digital technology because it is everywhere it’s on our phones, laptops, tablets, computers etc. But is it just to good to be true or like most things there are negatives and positives. The positives are connectivity you are able to talk over sea’s, talk to people you would of never been able to find, learn new and exciting things on a click on a button or just by asking siri, entertain yourself and much more. Sadly the negatives are much worse than the positives there is cyber bullying, viruses etc. But the worst thing by far is hacking.

This is going to be the major point I talk about. Hacking is probably the worst thing you can do on the internet you can sign into other peoples accounts on social media and mess with their online life, you could lock onto someone’s location by hacking and know wherever they are at any moment, the could hack your computer and know all your history or even lock your computer and make you pay for it and this is probably the lowest of the low a person could go too.

Global perspective

Hacking can effect people in a global scale because it can be used to scam people, mess with corporations and even give the US military something to worry about. It doesn’t help that the US military uses mac’s and windows. There are Macs in use on the DoD networks. DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) has developed a STIG for OS X as it has for Windows and Linux.Macs are not uncommon in military facilities in the Beltway. You won't however findMacs on the battlefield though, 99% of deployable computers run Windows.

What happens if someone hacks into the US militaries data base and finds top secret information and sells it to another country this could spark another world war. But this would be very hard because the US military has a group of people who stop hackers like this the have to stop about two thousand hackers a month sometimes it can be just small spam but there has been times when the have messed up so it is still dangerous. A 25 year old who lives in the UK hacked the US military for fun. A British computer hacker who allegedly hacked a United States Department of Defense satellite system in 2014 and accessed the personal information of hundreds of military personnel has pleaded guilty on Thursday.

Sean Caffrey, a 25-year-old resident of Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, has admitted to breaking into a US military communications system in June 2014 and stealing usernames and email addresses of over 800 employees and data from 30,000 satellite phones, the UK's National Crime Agency announced on Thursday.

Hackers have already started messing with politics as in when one hacker hacked Donald Trumps twitter account posting a video of adults who still liked my little pony the did this to make Donald trump look like a fool in front of the world even though it was a childish prank done by some American what happens if some does this with more evil intent and becomes the catalyst for a war between north Korea and America which could have a devastating effect on the world. There is also a fear that hackers will be able to mess with banks and destroy the currency of countries this is all possible and needs to be stopped by online police. There is also one more problem if the internet is policed by online police it would change it in a big way it would destroy the freedom of the internet.

This is a big problem because it would restrict website designers which help people and economies e.g. Google It helps give people jobs from all over the world this is good but with a online police it would discourage people. It would also make the web less private even more than it is this is a problem because big online companies can buy this information and sell it. Then the cycle goes around because the hackers can use that very information against you.

National perspective

Hacking would really effects Nigeria it can help aid corrupt politicians and people in similar jobs steal from Nigeria, help people steal without being seen, this is terrible because it is a big problem for Nigerians because this is destroying the economy. Which would effect public schools, roads, hospitals etc. It can be stopped by getting online police to make traps so that when someone is stealing money online the will let off a alarm then the corrupt individual would be caught and tried in the Nigerian court off law this would seriously help but If someone was able to break the system this means the would be able to hide the money in the cloud as credit this would be incredibly hard to find. This is a problem but it is bigger than hacking corruption is the problem but hacking is the fuel that powers negative things. Incidents of people hacking in Nigeria

Nigerian hackers and cyber criminals are being accused of masterminding a grand theft of information and money running into billions of dollars, worldwide. According to experts, the Nigerians are able to carry out the heist by sending phishing emails to commercial organizations and industrial enterprises, which they later steal dry. The FBI estimates that these phishing attacks have cost companies over $3 billion.

The number of affected companies exceeds 22,143. Kaspersky Labs, an internet security company said it has found over 500 companies that are under attack in at least 50 countries. Those under attack are mostly industrial enterprises and large transportation and logistics corporations, based in Germany, UAE, Russia and India. In a blog post, Kaspersky said the cyber-criminals managed to steal technical drawings, floor plans and diagrams showing the structure of electrical and information networks.

Researchers said that all indications are that these were business email compromise (BEC) attacks that have come to be associated with Nigerian cyber-criminals. Emails received by victims looked authentic enough to fool people. Some had attachments with names such as “Energy & Industrial Solutions W.L.L_pdf”, “Woodeck Specifications best Prices Quote.uue” and “Saudi Aramco Quotation Request for October 2016”.

These are well crafted emails that look legitimate and are crafted to make the victim open the malicious attachment. The emails ask the recipients to check information as soon as possible, clarify product pricing or receive goods specified in the delivery note attached. The malicious attachments contain RTF files with an exploit for the CVE-2015-1641 vulnerability. They may also contain archives of different formats containing malicious executable files or macros and OLE objects designed to download malicious executable files. Kaspersky discovered that the malicious files are intended to steal confidential data and install stealthy remote administration tools on infected systems.

Using Whois services, Kaspersky found that the domains used to host the malware were registered to residents of Nigeria. Once in, the hackers compromise a legitimate email and change the banking account details. The malware used in these attacks belonged to families that are popular among cyber-criminals, such as ZeuS, Pony/FareIT, LokiBot, Luminosity RAT, NetWire RAT, HawkEye, ISR Stealer and iSpy keylogger.

”The phishers selected a toolset that included the functionality they needed, choosing from malware available on cyber-criminal forums. At the same time, the malware was packed using VB and .NET packers – a distinct feature of this campaign. To evade detection by security tools, the malicious files were regularly repacked using new modifications of the same packers,” said the researchers. At least eight different Trojan-Spy and Backdoor families were used in the attacks. This is some evidence that proves that hackers are everywhere even in your local area.

Personal perspective

It effects everyone in a personal matter because hackers are everywhere even in your own neighborhood. The can do little things like hack into video games and sign into somebody’s social media account it’s like a small epidemic that can turn into something much greater the ruin video games and peoples online life the aid people who steal phones by helping them unlock the phone.

The hackers are said to be fixing small fraud tools on the ATMs in order to harvest the passwords of cardholders who come to collect cash or do some other transactions on the machines.

Top bank officials privy to the development said a number of banks had deployed detectives to monitor their ATMs in those locations, especially in the Victoria Island and Lekki axis. A banker told our correspondent, “A number of the ATMs in Victoria Island and Lekki axis have been compromised by hackers. Some of these fraudsters visit those ATMs very late in the night or very early in the morning to fix some fraud devices on them, which are capable of collecting cardholders’ information, including their passwords.

“They come back later to remove those devices. The information collected is then used to commit fraud against those customers later. See this is the problem how do you know if your credit card information has been saved and your money you have worked hard for is being spent by hackers who complain about stealing and corruption and is doing the same thing.

How to solve this problem?

Encryption is often viewed as one of the most tried and true ways to keep data safe—whether that data is living on a database or in transit between users, browsers, and the cloud. If you’re hacked—on a computer, in a data center, or in the cloud—that data will be pretty hard for a hacker to do anything with unless they have an encryption key. Encryption keys themselves should be stored somewhere safe, separate from the encrypted data.

These are the ways to stay protected from hacking:

1. Back up files consistently in an insulated, external environment so if you’re locked out, you can access them there—without having to pay a fee. This is probably the most important thing companies can do to recover from a ransomware attack, and can be the difference between getting your system back up and running within hours rather than days.
2. Stop malware where it starts. Solid endpoint security is a big step to preventing malware from infecting machines and getting onto the network. Educate users about phishing scams, suspicious links, and malicious attachments, and update browsers and use ad blockers to prevent against malvertising attacks.
3. Update everything. This means security software, browsers, and any third-party plugins that are targets for attacks, like Flash plugins or Java applets. If holes are detected in security software and patches are issued, stay on top of them.