Fighting E-Crime: A Losing Battle!

Regardless of the fact whether you are working in the area of information technology or in some other non related area, data security is something you should be familiar about because one way or another, we all utilize computers in some manner.  The fact is that computers have become an integral part of our personal and professional lives. Today, majority of organizations depend on computers for their day-to-day professional or personal tasks. For example: If you work in the area of human resources, it likely that all employee related data is stored on a server, Human resource professionals often have access to employee related information such as social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, employee addresses and employee names, such information can be good as gold for ID fraudsters, who can use this information to assume the identity of your employees. If you work in finance, it’s likely that you are dealing with confidential company information such as balance sheets, bank statements, cash flow statements, financial audit reports, company tax returns and other organization related financial data. Data of this sort can be useful for competitors who can strategically increase their profit margin simply by reading a few financial reports related to your organization. Perhaps you are an engineer and are engineering a new device; it’s likely that you have the blue-print saved somewhere on your computer, such information can be useful to hackers, as they can sell your blue-print on the black market.

Therefore, the preceding examples leave little doubt about the usefulness of various types of data for e-crooks, to make matters worse, e-crime is the fastest growing crime around the globe and it does not have any borders, making it the toughest crime to prosecute.  Currently, there is no international legislation between countries that would make it possible to prosecute e-criminals who have conducted e-crimes across international borders. The fact of the matter is most crimes originate from third world nations which have little or no e-crime laws; moreover, these crimes target North American or Europeans residents from countries such as Nigeria, Romania and India.  Such countries don’t have or lack enforcement for crimes conducted via the internet in a different country. Therefore, the best offense against these criminals is an unbeatable defense.  The following steps are proven methods for data defense:

Firewall Software:

The first major step people should take is that they should invest in good firewall software which will prevent remote access to your computer, with firewall software hackers will not be able to easily crack through your antivirus firewall.

Password Protection:

Although good firewall software will protect you from hackers across the globe, it won’t protect anyone physically accessing your PC, therefore, you will need to lock your PC using password protection.

Portable Data Security:

Using USB storage devices can be risky, to avoid becoming victim to e-crime, users need to Secure USB devices with a third party portable data protection software.

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