Internet criminals are getting increasingly clever and are using far more sophisticated methods to steal money from people online than was the case a few years ago.
They will infiltrate your system with Trojans, backdoors, spyware, phishing and other methods, all just to get those magical numbers on your credit card so they can drain your bank account.
And with the recent arrest of the big ring of internet criminals, the Mariposa Botnet, thought to be one of the biggest botnets in history which had infected over 13 million computers worldwide, attention to internet security solutions is on the rise.
But who are the people behind these botnets?
Pranksters? Teenage hackers? Bored adolescents?
This was the case a few years ago when the internet was young and people discovered that they could use their programming skills to attack others and get a kick out of it.
Today however, the situation is far more serious as these techniques have been adopted by devious criminals who understand the large potential for money by attacking computer users.
And just like any criminal network, cyber criminals will target victims that are easy to exploit and that can return massive profits, in this case; anyone with a computer.
But since big corporations will have far more advanced security than your average home computer, home computers are off course the easiest target, a home computer user may have less money in the bank, but when you affect an enormous amount of people, you can get an enormous amount of money.
And that’s exactly the purpose of a botnet; to attack and control as many computers as possible, to spread the damage as wide as possible.
The Mariposa Botnet was just one botnet, and is not the only botnet in existence today.
Everyday people receive spam in their emails, internet websites are attacked and overloaded, malware applications is spread through the use of home computers and people have their personal information and passwords stolen by programs in their own computers.
And all this is done using the computers of private citizens, so the real criminals can continue to do their damage without being detected by the authorities, just like a mafia boss will use running boys to execute their illegal activities.
Only in the case of the digital mafia, the running boys don’t know they are running boys.
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