Unless you are trained in ethical hacking course online training or application defense training or any sort of cyber security training for that matter, you are probably in one of the few categories mentioned below. This article tries to determine why common people, who form the majority of the internet population, are not able to fight cyber attacks that are growing every day in number and impact. P.S. By the time you finish this sentence, a cyber attack will have already taken place somewhere around the world.
1. People Are Untrained
One of the major reasons behind the rampant cyber attacks is that people who interact with digital technologies are highly untrained in digital hygiene and cyber security in general. We receive so many emails every single day in our inbox, not knowing that a lot of them are phishing mails that have malicious attachments and links inside them. Due to our lack of competency in differentiating between a genuine and a malicious message, phishing has become one of the most effective means of delivering malware. And it’s not just about clicking on phishing mails, the lack of training is also reflected in our careless use of unfamiliar USBs in our computers and downloading things from fraudulent sources.
2. People Love Freebies
Hackers, or any other criminals for that matter, lure their victims with the bait that mostly always work: freebies! Everyone loves free stuff. But we generally forget that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Yes, it is a good thing to believe in the goodness of people, thinking that they must be providing us something for free out of a pure, genuine heart, but when it comes to safety, it is better to be suspicious than to be sorry. If you don’t know someone in real life, how can you trust them with your data on the internet? You never know what hackers can do with just the right amount of harmless looking information that you share with them through the internet.
3. People Don’t Care
Even if people are trained in cyber security or know better than being a dumb freeloader who doles out their information to strangers all over the internet, sometimes it seems that they simply don’t care. Ask this question to yourself and your friends: how much do you care about safety in your computer? Do you care when your PC tries to warn you from visiting a particular website? Do you care when your PC reminds you to update your system because it has important security patches in it? No, you usually don’t. People just go on snoozing about the reminders and ignoring the signs because let’s face it, no one cares until they get attacked.
4. People Are Not Careful
Being aware and trained is one thing, but being careful is another. There are so many instances when a huge cyber attack could have been avoided with just a little bit of carefulness. When it comes to this factor, organisations score higher than individuals in the sense that many employers are careless about security procedures and are lenient with safety policies in their companies. They don’t realise that they are giving more than required access to their employees, that they are leaving their passwords on their desks, that they are not restricting access of their ex-employees or that they are not hiring professionals like CEH certification online for identifying their security vulnerabilities.
Let’s admit it. The cybersecurity culture in our world is not as advanced as it should be at this stage where cyber attacks have become the usual affair and cyber losses have become so staggering that they are raising some serious concerns all over the world.