New year, but old life for computers: 2017 began in the wake of recent months, with a strong incidence of viruses and attacks by computer pirates. But part of the responsibility lies with the users themselves, who often overlook the importance of a secure password.
What happens when the laziness of computer users is combined with the "ability" of the cyber pirates, capable of creating ever new and more numerous threats? As can be imagined, the final result is an increase in problems related to safety systems such as PCs, smartphones and data storage machines, which are subject to attack by attackers.
Virus to the hospital! The latest news has some curious aspects, because this time the virus hit the hospital. Obviously we are still talking about the digital sphere: England's national healthcare system, in fact, has been hit by several ransomware that blocked the devices. The same English organization explained that the "victims" were exclusively PCs with the Windows XP operating system, infected by the fearsome ransomware, the malware that has been negatively impacting the last few months, infecting the PC and limiting access to owners and users, at least until a ransom is paid which "frees" the files.
Personal responsibilities. In this case, what facilitated the pirates' path was the use of operating systems obsolete, which have allowed cyber criminals to enter the web and put it at risk privacy of English citizens. In other situations, however, it is the users themselves who prove to be careless and lazy and who attract problems: this is also revealed by the latest research from the Keeper Security company, which has drawn up the ranking of the worst Password used by Internet users over the last year.
Unsafe passwords. Sifting through this ranking, we discover that the most used keyword is the predictable "123456“, which slightly surpasses the sequence “123456789” and another evergreen like “QWERTY“. To arrive at these results, the company analyzed a database of over 10 million keywords available on the web, obtained from violazioni of data during the year. Well, 17% of Internet users used “123456” as a password to access online services, and only 25 strings total more than half of the 10 million analyzed, proving that imagination is in short supply and attention to security is still too low.
Goodbye data? These viruses can infect PCs and home systems, often offering few alternatives to the victims, who can turn to professionals to eliminate the problem or to a specialized company such as File Recovery, which specializes in data recovery from damaged hard disk or hit by malware and the like. But in recent years the attacks are also targeting mobile devices and social networks, expanding the range of problems for ordinary people.
New attacks. The mechanism with which cyber criminals act is almost always the same: users are tricked into clicking on the "wrong" link, which opens the door to potentially dangerous viruses. The new channels of diffusion of these malware they are social media, like Messenger by Facebook, Whatsapp messages or chain letters, in which misleading links appear which then contaminate the entire device (and spread to the network contacts).
Risky emails. But perhaps the means most used by hackers remains that of mail, where words like “spam"and "Phishing” are now the order of the day. And if in many cases the "falseness" of the message is evident, with the fraudulent intent of extorting sensitive information and data, in others the links are in some way masked or more hidden, or contained in apparently harmless attachments which instead, as in the situations described above, they jeopardize all data collected and fillet present in the pc.
The importance of a secure server. Data loss can also affect websites. In these cases it is necessary to rely on professional and secure servers such as those offered by flamenetworks, which offer daily backup service avoiding unpleasant inconveniences in case of sudden crashes.