Physical Crime versus Cybercrime

In some ways physical crime and cybercrime can be similar, but in other ways they can be very different. With a physical crime, there is always risk of losing a material possession, becoming injured or possibly even death. With a cybercrime, you have the potential of virtually losing your life a different way depending on how bad you have been hacked. Ultimately, they are both crimes that have the potential to cause significant damage to people, and we must appropriately protect ourselves and ensure there are adequate penalties for those that choose to engage in either crime. In 2019, almost everyone has their personal and financial information in several systems. If someone can even get credentials into one of those systems, there is no limit to the damage they can do.  That one system could potentially provide access to something as obvious as credit card or bank account numbers to personal information that can be used for full identity theft, which can cause significant damage to that person. A lot of times, people use the same passwords for several accounts, so gaining entry into one account may provide the credentials for several accounts. What is worse is that the breach may have happened because someone else was careless with your access credentials or information. The real risk is that nowadays, people have more of their assets online than in their home. If someone breaks into a house, they have a very limited time to grab what they can; additionally, there is a limit to what they can get, so they may target obvious things like jewelry. You may lose those items, or they may not be easily replaced; however, if someone breaks in online, it can take years to recover, which will be much more devastating to people’s lives. If someone has their identity taken, it can even affect that person getting a job in the future because of negative credit ratings. In the end, a house is like a database and key to the house is like the password to the virtual door that contains all the information a hacker needs. What we need to understand today is that there are many ways to get a key to one of these doors, and it is not just your responsibility to protect your keys, but to protect the keys to other peoples doors that you may have access to. You might have these for several reasons: a friend may have shared access information with you; you may have access into a system at work; systems you work with may have information on other business; or worst yet, those same systems may have access to the personal information of your clients.