Net Crimes and Misdemeanors
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Net Crimes and Misdemeanors: Outmaneuvering web spammers, stalkers, and con artists, by J.A. Hitchcock. At our Idaho Falls library you can find this book under 364.168 HIT in the adult non-fiction section (It’s on the new releases shelves right now).
The first chapter described how the author got involved with the subject. She started getting attacked by a spammer she had identified online in some discussion groups. The spammer didn’t like it, and went to unimaginable lengths to annoy, bombard, and even threaten the author. The story is quite amazing.
This book is great because it explains all sorts of online dangers that you hear about in the media, but aren’t too sure about what they are or how they happen.
These include spoofing, viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, phishing schemes, auction fraud, stolen identities, encryption, firewalls, digital signatures, and online fraud. I especially liked how the explained some of the biggest urban legends and hoaxes, because I get those from sympathetic (but unfortunately naive) coworkers all the time.
This book went into some online problem areas I had not heard much about, including adoption fraud, jilted lovers taking revenge online, and online bullying. They explain what trolls and flamers are (troublemakers), explain good and bad chat examples, online dating pitfalls and successes, how to protect children online, office netiquette, and what various police departments are doing in computer forensics.
I highly recommend reading this book, because it will increase your technology savvy. I cleaned it up in a day while camping. If I were still teaching computer classes, I would use this as a textbook to assign groups a chapter each, then have each group make a multimedia presentation on that chapter to the class. That is how improtant I feel this information is.
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Comments
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0 Archy, that’s an excellent point. They did touch on the subject of physical security, but an excellent read about that is Kevin Mitnick’s Art of Deception. The stories I read in there dropped my jaw. I’ll write a review on that soon.
The saying is, ‘there’s no patch for human stupidity’.
I don’t know that it’s so much stupidity, but sometimes people suspend their normal common sense around technology (like writing passwords on stickies around the computer).
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0 0 Well, yes. It’s a common misconception that the hack comes over the line. All of that info we protect so carefully on the Net is often to be found written on scraps or tucked in our wallets, purses, etc. I suppose one could apply the analogy backwards for the uninitiated and say “You protect your purse, so protect yourself online, too.”
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0 0 Ok now this is something I do know about. actualy one of the most common ways to get hacked is with a trojan virus like sub7 netbus and boserv there are thousands of trojans. What is a trojan u ask? well a trojan is a file that looks usefull and is atatched to a working or non working program. that will create a server on a victims pc and allow the abuser or user to have full access to a victims pc with the GUI client. Graphic user interface. this person can uplioad and download from the victims pc and also see screen shots of his or her desktop. they can steal all cached passwords and logins for most accounts on the victims computer. and even change them and steal e-mail accounts and freinds on a messenger they can intercept messages and even resend them after editing content. they can even access entire networks and printers webcams even turn your mic on and listen to u. its easy to do that too. education is the best defense against a hacker. or a good firewall.
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0 0 And let’s not forget simple keyloggers, which simply collect everything you type in and send it. But I would assume that’s covered in the book.
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0 0 One good tip for the concerned is to use anything other than IE for a browser. It is just swiss cheese. There are a lot of good ones out there. Mozilla or Opera, perhaps.
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I will give this book a read when it is in. I also recommend Reading any how to hack book available. It looks like someone hacked my library and I can’t find the one I really like to give you a title. These books explain just how vulnerable one is. One topic I didn’t see in your discription of the book (although I’m sure it fits in) is the physical hack. The actual casing of the physical area to be accessed. I was just in a store the other day and while I was looking at some data with an employee, I noticed the oh so typical post-its with usernames, passwords, email accounts, etc. Anyone who wants could get to sit in that chair and look at that data. All other security goes out the window.
Just a little point on the subject. Watch who is around your system. Other easily acquired data include the make and model you are using, the OS, and often the Security or firewall shortcuts are right there in plain sight.
Thanks for the suggestion, and may I just say as you have elsewhere that we have an incredible library for a town this size.