Information technology (IT) has made a revolutionary impact on our lives. The world has become a global village and the worldwide communication has become fast and efficient. The traditional products of IT are telephone, mobile phone, fax machine and computer but its most earth-shattering invention is internet.
From business to the showbiz industry and the press, the internet has modernized almost every department of our lives. Today, everyone is using internet, whether he/she is a student or a teacher, an office employee or a business magnate, a small organization or large cooperation. In the nutshell, imagining the life without internet is impossible.
But we are not enjoying these blessings of internet in exchange of nothing and many of us are paying a heavy price of it because the invention of internet has given birth to a new world of crime – the cyber crime. Cyber Crimes, or the computer crimes, include hacking, copyright infringement, child pornography etc.
Now the question arises is that how these cyber crimes can be stopped? Unfortunately catching the cyber criminals isn’t same as a traditional criminal, against whom we make a phone call to police and they launch the search operation. The cyber criminals perform their work in a very proficient and clandestine manner and the techniques used by them are efficient to be imagined for us. However, what we can do is to take strong security measures against them.
Though the preventive measures against cyber crimes may cause a bit trouble but we should try to overhaul these crimes by spreading awareness against them, by imposing some restrictions on the use of internet cafes and awarding stronger penalization to any caught cyber criminal. Let’s have a look over some easy options available, by adopting which we could avoid ourselves from becoming the victims of these cyber crimes.
Turn-on the Spam blocker:
You should’ve sufficient knowledge of phishing before using the internet. Make sure that you have turned-on the spam blocker because it prevents the unwanted phony emails which contains the spoofed links that automatically delivers your valuable personal data, such as credit card numbers or Windows ID credentials, to a malicious third party.
Usually the phishing e-mail ask the victim to send the account information, a web link or phone number on the pretext of such sort of phrases, “You have won the lottery”, “Verify your account”, “Respond within 72 hours, otherwise your account will be closed” Now if the victim is unaware of this sort of phishing attacks, he clicks those malicious web links and set-off the attack sequence.
Therefore, to prevent the valuable personal information from phishing attacks, one must know what measures he should adopt to make his account secured from these malicious acts.
Initially he/she should be acknowledged of the fake and spoofed websites announcing prizes and lotteries and secondly, he should turn-on the spam-blocker, which scans the emails and deletes those which found fraudulent. So in order to prevent the cyber crimes, it is necessary that every internet user has the sufficient knowledge of coping with these cunning techniques of hackers.
Install Anti-Virus Software:
Every user should install anti-virus and anti-malicious software before using the internet to prevent the eye-logging attacks which can expose the every stroke of your keyboard to a cyber criminal.
Set strong account password:
These safety measures for the protection of our computers can cause some dis-utilities. For example if we set a very strong password of our online account for its security, there is a risk of forgetfulness. The difficult passwords are always hard to be recovered. So in order to prevent the problems crop up from forgetting the passwords, you should link your account to some other account, which’s password you can easily remember for a long time. On the other hand, the safety of an online account isn’t possible without a strong password because the hackers can detect the weak passwords easily with the help of password detecting software.
Erect Firewall:
Another good preventive measure to bolster the security of your computer is to erect the firewall between the different parts of computer but there is a dilemma with it as slows down the speed of computer. The firewall prohibits the unauthorized data packets to reach the other end.
The working mechanism of a firewall is to scan the every file passing from hard disk, RAM and cache to the processer. This process often takes time and ultimately reduces the performance of computer. Beside time consumption, another bothering attribute of firewall is that it seeks the user’s permission of the administrator for processing each file.
However, despite all of its drawbacks, the firewall should be erected because it scans and detects the every virus and malicious wares from the computer and provides it protection against planned cracker attacks. If the user has blocked certain information through firewall, it couldn’t enter into the system. Contrastingly, if a computer user has not erected the firewall, his information can be accessed by the cyber criminal with a little trick. In short, using firewall is vital for the internet security.
Tracing cyber criminal is as hard as trading one’s soul with devil because majority of them commit their crimes from net cafés, where a number of people use the internet daily without revealing their identity. So the cyber criminals go to the internet café fearlessly and carry out their sinister deeds easily. So what is direly needed to control these cyber crimes is to place some restrictions on the use of net cafes. The users should be restricted to provide their full identification before using the internet. This is the only way to save world’s most important facility –the Internet – from the unlawful activities of cyber criminals. check the latest cyber crimes stats
