Privacy Invasion

My computer is sick …

When it comes to the limits of privacy and freedom on the internet, cybercrime is a very serious matter. I personnally have been a victim of this type of crime. Don't worry, I have survived, (and I am stronger than ever!) and now I know that the Web can be a dangerous world if you don't stay vigilant.
If you want to read about my encounter with cybercrime last year please check out my previous article.

Before explaining what cybercrime really is, let's state some facts. According to Symantec, cybercrime has surpassed illegal drug trafficking as a criminal moneymaker, and every three seconds an identity is stolen. Any unaware internet user is therefore a potential target.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody!

So, what attacks are we really referring to? Fraud, forgery, unauthorized access, child pornography… It's quite complicated and difficult to establish a concrete list of what is considered as cybercrime, and to decide upon the ways to prevent such illegal actions. To me, the definition is simple: when somebody's security and privacy are jeopardised, then we can consider this person to be a victim of cybercrime.

How does it happen? Well, one moment of foolishness and your computer can be attacked by a hidden Trojan horse… You can receive a mail requesting to enter your password, or you can click on a hostile website. In all cases, a virus is introduced in the heart of your Data and, unless your Antivirus is active and powerful, all your private information (bank account, photos, files…) is endangered, free of access and deeply threatened.

If you've read my article that relates my unhappy experience with indentity theft on eBay, you'll understand the seriousness of the problem: my password was stolen and I received tons of mails from eBay users asking me why I kept on asking them the price of their objects. What happened was that my user account was stolen by some kind of pirate whose main objective was to extract money from random users. Fortunately my reaction was efficient and radical: I contacted the constumer service online (it's actually a chatroom where you can talk directly to eBay employees), I completely deleted my account and the story was over. The bad point is that now I don't trust at all this type of website. But at least I know that I am safe: I uploaded several Antiviruses, and I never click on suspicious contents.

…However, can we really be 100% sure that we are protected from any kind of attack?

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