Cybercrime: Hacking Goes Way Beyond Simple Identity Theft | Marc Goodman
  • 6 years ago
Do you know how your iPhone works? Because cybercriminals do. Futurist and global security advisor Marc Goodman explains how our void in tech knowledge lets hackers have a field day, and how to make yourself less vulnerable. Goodman's latest book is "Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World" (http://goo.gl/tw9EIi).

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Transcript - Technology can be used against us in ways that we don’t understand. Most people in our modern society have become expert users of technology but they have no idea how things operate under the hood. This is true of all generations, particularly with millennials. People think millennials are great with tech and it’s true they’re expert users. But when it comes to understanding the science of technology, the computer and science and the electrical engineering that goes into making a particular app work most people are clueless. And the challenge of that is that there are people in our world who know how technology works. The people who create those tools out in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and then other people who take the time to educate themselves. Whether it be people who have studied it professionally or on their own but in particular even criminals and terrorists and rogue governments have worked on these tools, decompiled them, deconstructed them and the fact of the matter is most criminals understand your iPhone better than you do and can use it against you.

When people think of cybercrime or computer crime they always think of the basics. My credit card number got hacked. My identity was stolen. That type of stuff. It’s so common these days to tap into most people at one point in their life or another. But there are so many other things that criminals can do with technology that the average person wouldn’t even realize. So let’s take your mobile phone for example. There was an android exploit that came out recently called Stagefright and just by sending a text message to an individual on an android phone anybody who read those messages or clicked on the links their mobile phone could be taken over in an instant. The fascinating thing about it is is that it affected one billion android users across the world. So just one hacker could have taken over a billion android devices. And once they have access to the devices not only can they read everything that you type, get access to your entire address book, see every photograph private or not that you may have ever taken on your phone. They can get access to all your social media accounts, capture your email address and your log on credentials and password for all of your financial apps, for your bank accounts, investment accounts and the like. And they can even track you physically in the world and know where you are at any particular time. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/PqYnyq.