You Don’t Understand Hackers or Computers? Hackers Will Still Hack You

Yes we(humans) are Risk seeking  with losses, and risk averse with gains.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/01/the_psychology_of_se.html

“Security is a tradeoff,” Schneier said, speaking to a packed audience at his RSA session. “What are you getting for what you’re giving up? Whether you make that tradeoff consciously or not, there is one.”

You think that your computers are not getting attacked?

You think that there is nothing on your computers that is worth anything?

Hackers don’t think so.  They can make money with computers that  are “owned”…  this means the hacker has control of your computer. Each computer that is “owned” can be used to do the bidding of the criminal hacker.

I can list the various methods of attack and  how the hacker can attack like in one of my previous images:

But it is more important how much each owned attack is worth to the hacker.  And the more we put in our computers (like medical records.  Here is the latest image attempting to explain the value of a hacked computer on the Darknet.

All of us need to understand the value of our digital assets to criminal hackers – it is not $0. Every computer has a value, if nothing else for its CPU and network connection.

 

Have you heard of DDOS(Distributed Denial Of Service) attacks?

 

Each one of those machines is controlled by the hacker. And each machine can attack – that is worth something to a criminal.

Therefore all computers are worth some money on the Internet. (even if there are no accounts on the machine.

 

Here is a News story on the latest DDOS attack:

http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/29/linux-botnet-hits-with-150-gbps-ddos/

Of course this news story is about Linux botnet (which means a bunch of Linux servers are controlled by the criminals).  But it serves my purpose of explaining to all how much their computer is worth.