Journal Entry #12

As much of a positive impact that cyber technology has on society, it has also opened an avenue for offenders to violate the rights of others. This avenue has become known as cybercrime. Offenders have found a way to use cyber technology to abuse the privilege of having access to the abundance of resources that have become openly available on the internet. From those resources, offenders bend the utility of them for their own malicious usage. Tools used to inform others of the dangers that are present in cyber technology systems, are the same tools that hackers use to exploit the vulnerabilities that users are not aware of. For instance, the same network sniffing tools that systems admins use to monitor the traffic that takes place over their network can be utilized by hackers to find the open ports that are unguarded in a network. Once they have knowledge of what vulnerabilities there are in a system, they can go to a forum that publish the existence of these vulnerabilities to the public to determine what exploits to use to create back doors in vulnerable systems. The irony of this malicious approach is that the forums that hackers visit to find the exploits are published to the public intended to help users secure their systems. When ethical hackers find vulnerabilities in operating systems, they contact the development company first to verify if they themselves are aware of the exploit, then they issue a statement to the public to help users update their systems and patch the vulnerabilities. In the same vein, is the tool of social media. The intended use of social media is to allow for others to connect and network with others around the world by means of sharing ideas and experiences. This seems like a great idea to bring people of different backgrounds together, but hackers can find ways to abuse these communication platforms. Many users of social media use their accounts for advertising and business purposes. When hackers gain hold of accounts like these, they can steal the identity user and potentially tarnish their reputation. In a sense the internet be a “catch 22”, sometimes we can’t live with it and sometimes we can’t live with it.

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