Privacy, Security & Virus Information

When they said that crime doesn't pay, they obviously hadn't heard of cybercrime

It was no less a figure than fictional crime boss Tony Soprano who told his team of square-jawed, leisure suited underbosses in the mid nineties that organised crime was recession proof. OK that was fiction, but internet security experts McAfee have recently issued a thought provoking report stating that cyber crime is big, in fact bigger than anything than Tony or even the real crime bosses could ever have dreamed off.

Illegal earnings from cybercrime is too large to be estimated, yet McAfee in their report state the cyber criminals have succeeded in generating double digit growth over the last decade, which are figures that any international conglomerate would be proud of. It is interesting to speculate that international cyber crime has an infra-structure and if it would ever be possible to track down the "boss of bosses" and bring him (or her) to trial. Speculation is that cybercrime is basically organised and from the top, but is powered on a franchise like operation, where various forms of virus software is generated and sold off to lower level hyper criminals who actually try to extricate the hard earned cash from the unsuspecting and innocent.

Dave Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs wrote in his report on cyber crime that it is probably the fastest growing and lucrative industries of the new millennium, evolving from antics of a few software programming geeks in the early years of decade to a series of ever-evolving threats focused on every aspect of internet surfing, with the cream of the crop being the social media sites, which are difficult to govern and provide hackers with loads of opportunities to mount their attacks.

The McAfee reports that the number of people using the internet has increased fivefold in the last ten years, which translates to close two billion web surfers that theoretically can be converted to victims of some form of cyber crime.

That's why it is so vitally important for every computer that is connected to the internet to be protected against organised crime, which hacking has become. Until cyber criminals can be attacked in their lairs, then the best form of attack is defence. If they are prevented from easily accessing too many personal details, then a career in cyber crime will be a lot less attractive and there is a real possibility that the online crime wave might even go away. That means prevention and the only way to prevent cyber crime at this point in history, is to install McAfee anti-virus software. It doesn't come with a blue flashing light, but it certainly does the job.

 

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