Wednesday, December 21, 2011

With Hackers All Over The Place, How Do You Protect Yourself From Them When On The Internet

By Cindy Marshson


Think about your daily life: go through your twenty four hour routine. Amidst all of the stuff you have to do, technology is embedded within. It starts in the morning; if you are an average worker, you have to turn on your car to get to your place of work. Before that, again probably for most, you have to power on your coffee maker to get you going for the rest of the day! Many people claim that they cannot even think before a cup of coffee. After you have used your trusty machines to get you started, you are at work.

That is, if your first destination is work. Maybe you need to make a side trip for some food, so you key it into your handy dandy Global Positioning System (GPS for the tech savvy) and drive off where the satellites guide you. Your robotic computer voice will show you the best route, glancing down at your pinpoint from space. At the fast food joint, you use a small piece of plastic to pay for your food, something an early colonist would have thought was alien technology. Another thing they would have been shocked about too: such an abundance of food!

Once you've inhaled your fuel supply for the rest of the day, you have most likely circumvented traffic with your GPS and arrived at work on time. Assuming you are employed at a big company managing a small piece of the business, your life for the rest of the remaining work day revolves solely around computers. The business you do all day relies completely on technology ; even the human driven elements of the business would fail without a technological medium.

You hop on your computer and log into your security password protected accounts and start filing away all of the days work. You then come across some sort of conundrum in your files and have to call your supervising manager. Through the phone service, you have just solved a problem with your files, your computer, and can now get back to work. Technology facilitates nearly every aspect of a business. The problem is though, in your little corporate world, you sometimes forget to factor the outside world, except when it comes to sales.

When you are at your board meetings and the president asks how you guys can bring up sales of a product, obviously the key is to the customers. After all, they are the ones you are producing for and the ones who are putting their money into your hands. The best way to reach people is via advertising, so you set out on acquiring some ad space and set up an ad. Would you ever think to tell people you will exchange any of your company's personal information in exchange for their business?

This is truthfully a terrible plan. Your marketing money would be for quite a waste, and your supervisor would be very disappointed in your indiscretion. Any business you did get due to the strange ads would certainly not be good business. If somebody did take advantage of the sensitive data you gave them in return for a couple of their dollars could net them access to all of your company bank accounts. Then, they would walk away with your product as well as their money back, and then some!

As hard as it is to come to terms with, people can get acquire this sort of information even without your outrageous marketing scheme. A hacker could hack into that the very same computer you put data into every day at work and uncover all sorts of things about your business. If they use this information to its potential, they could take money right out of the company's accounts and no one would ever realize it was them. So while technology escorted you through your tough morning, it could also be the downfall of your business.

How then do we halt these criminals from breaking into our information strongholds? The most quickly used answer is to just use some sort of security mechanisms on all of your Internet enabled software, but sometimes these programs are not enough. The most successful practice you could uphold is to actually just be more careful. Oftentimes the criminal who perpetrates these crimes is actually just some guy in your office dying to make some extra money. Just don't give any data from your business, and make use of a variety of online security protocol.




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