- Hi. My name's Jenny Martin
and I'm the Director of Cybersecurity
Investigations at Symantec.
Today cybercrime causes huge problems
for society.
Personally, financially, and even
in matters of national security.
Just in the last few years,
hundreds of millions of credit card numbers
have been stolen.
Tens of millions of social security numbers
and health care records were compromised.
Even nuclear centrifuges have been hacked
and unmanned aerial drones have been hijacked.
This is all done by exploiting vulnerabilities
in hardware and software.
Or more often by taking advantage of
unintentional decisions made by the people
using the software.
The people committing these cybercrimes
don't fit a single profile or motivation.
It could be anyone from an international terrorist,
to a teenager competing for bragging rights.
Today, the largest countries not only
have a regular army, but also have
a well-armed cyber army.
In fact, the next world war may not
be fought with traditional weapons
but with computers, used to shut down
national water supplies, energy grids,
and transportation systems.
- Hi. My name is Parisa
and I'm Google's Security Princess.
I've worked on a lot of different Google products
in a lot of different ways to try and make our software
as secure as possible.
Now let's take a look at how cybercrime
works under the hood.
We'll learn about software viruses,
denial-of-service attacks, and phishing scams.
In biology in life, a virus is an organism
that is spread by coughing, sneezing,
or physical contact.
Viruses work by infecting cells,
injecting their genetic material
and using those cells to replicate.
They can make people really sick
and then spread to other people.
A computer virus works a bit similarly.
A virus is an executable program
that gets installed, usually unintentionally,
and harms a user and their computer.
It's also possible for a virus to spread itself
to other computers.
Now how does a virus get on your computer
in the first place?
There are couple ways an attacker
can infect someone's computer.
They might lure a victim into installing a program
with deception about the program's purpose.
So for example, a lot of viruses are disguised
as security updates.
It's also possible that the software on your computer
has a vulnerability.
So an attacker can install itself
without even needing explicit permission.
Once a virus in on your computer
it can steal or delete any of your files,
control other programs, or even allow someone else
to remotely control your computer.
Using computer viruses, hackers can take over
millions of computers worldwide.
And then use them as a digital army,
otherwise known as a botnet,
to attack and take down websites.
This kind of attack is called
a distributed denial-of-service.
A denial-of-service is when hackers
overwhelm a website with too many requests.
We call it a distributed denial-of-service
when the attack comes from many computers
all at once.
Most websites are ready to respond
to millions of requests a day,
but if you hit them with billions or trillions
of requests coming from different places,
the computers are overloaded and stop responding.
- Another trick used by cybercriminals
is to send large amounts of spam email
in an attempt to trick people
into sharing sensitive personal information.
This is called a phishing scam.
A phishing scam is when you get
what seems like a trustworthy email
asking you to login to your account,
but clicking the email takes you to a fake website.
If you login anyway, you've been tricked
into giving your password away.
Hackers can then use your login credentials
to access your real accounts
to steal information, or maybe even
to steal your money.
Fortunately there are many companies,
laws, and government organizations
working to make the internet safer.
But these efforts are not enough.
You may think when a computer system gets hacked,
the problem was the security design,
or the software.
90% of the time a system gets hacked however,
it's not because of a security bug,
but because of a simple mistake made by a human.
- It turns out there are steps we can all take
to protect ourselves.
Often, your actions not only impact
the security of your own data and computer,
but the security of everyone
at your school, workplace, and home.
With billions or trillions of dollars at stake,
cybercriminals get smarter each year,
and we all need to keep up.