Technology News

Archive for May, 2009

I was shocked to learn how fast the threat of cybercrime is growing. I couldn’t believe a report from the Department of Treasury that the profits of Cybercrime are greater than the profits of the sale of illegal drugs. When President Obama informed us that cybercriminals have stolen $8 billion dollars from Americans in the past two years and the cost of repairing computers has risen to $11 billion a year. Cybercrime is not about vandalism. It is about our economy.

Beware of free or store bought security software installed on your computer that claims to protect you from cybercriminals. Your chance of becoming a victim is 7 out of 10. Companies like McAfee, Symantec (Norton), and Trend Micro, Inc. spend a lot of money advertising how good their products are, but Computer World Security writes that they “confirmed vulnerabilities in their security software that could let hackers hijack systems.

The security software and suites that these companies sell do not prevent cybercrime. They mainly focus on worms, Trojans horses, and spyware that allow hackers to infect your computer. It takes many hours for the security companies to capture and analyze the problem, write a new solution, and get it to you. Therefore, hackers are always one step ahead of the security companies. This explains why 172,000 computers are hacked each day.

Security companies do not focus on vulnerabilities, e.g. weak passwords, software bugs, a computer virus or other malware that allow hackers to install malware on your computer, take your sensitive data, convince you to open an email message with attached malware, or copy a hardened, encrypted program onto a thumb drive and crack it at home. Not focusing on these vulnerabilities can bring the ‘blue screen of death ‘ and make your operating system unusable.

Typically, when people think of criminal acts, they immediately go to things such as home intrusions, car thefts, and so and while these are crimes, we now see a new type of criminal act associated with computers and internet technology. Unfortunately, crime has changed and with computers being a part of most homes and businesses, it makes perfect sense that computer crimes would become a problem. To help battle this problem, colleges and universities are providing computer forensics training. With a completed education, potential for an amazing career is very real.

If you have an interest in law enforcement or criminology, and you enjoy working with computers, perhaps forensics training is exactly what you need. Because this has become such a growing field, this type of training is a common offering at most schools. As a part of this training, you would learn everything you need to know for researching and capturing hidden data so hackers and other computer criminals would be stopped. In fact, using your computer forensics training, you would play an important role in seeing these criminals prosecuted while helping companies protect proprietary information maintained on computers.

You will also discover that computer forensics training is exciting and the courses are diverse. This type of training will show you proper methods for recovering data, as well as deleted or encrypted files on a computer. Other benefits of computer forensics training includes being capable of identifying any type of legal activity while using small hints that a hacker accidentally left behind on the hard drive. To do your job, you would use various tools and software programs, helping you find and recover vital data that could be lost forever without your assistance.

As you look at different colleges and universities where computer forensics training is offered, you would find that the classes are much the same but there are small differences. Even the time it would take to go through computer forensics training could be different between each school. Remember, if you are tired of working a dead end job, a career in forensics is not just exciting, but it is also a very rewarding experience. Yes, computer forensics training requires time to complete and you would need to take special courses but in the end, you would have a chance to help fight the growing battle of computer crime.

With computer forensics training, several different levels need to be completed. For the basic levels, you would need some knowledge of the Windows Operating System while understanding that this type of computer education is more of a science. For a moderate level career, a computer science degree is required but if you plan to work a more basic type job, then this type of degree may not be necessary. On the other hand, if you plan moving to a higher level for a computer forensics career, additional training in addition to the computer science degree would be mandated.