Homework #3

10 Security Trends To Watch In 2012: By Matthew J. Schwartz: January 17, 2012

            This article mainly talked about the security changes that we will most likely see in 2012.  A lot of these problems were discussed in our last class.  We talked about hacking, phishing, cyber espionage and malware in our last class, which were all topics in the article as security issues.  Something that I thought was interesting was how they talked about more protection for cell phones.  Cell phones usually contain a lot of personal information on them and are vulnerable to attack or getting hacked.  Even if they aren’t under attack you could easily just lose it.  In the article they talked about a cell phone tracking system and something that could erase the data in a cell phone from anywhere.  This could prevent people from using private information on your cell phone.  Another thing that grabbed my attention was the risk of social networks.  Hackers usually set up fake paypal accounts that people use and put their valuable information in.  This caught my attention because a few months ago I got a virus that crashed my whole laptop and the only thing I could bring up was something for google chrome and it wanted me to buy something.  It looked real and authentic but I knew something was wrong because it was the only thing I could do so I didn’t fall for it and got it fixed. The information on spear-phishing was also interesting.  It said it is impossible to block these attacks because a good amount of them are employees opening emails from unknown sources. I think every company should educate employees on subjects like this to reduce the chance of them opening it.  I think they should make this part of their training because it isn’t worth the damage if the company’s whole system gets infected by a virus or something.  I learned the dangers that could potentially happen on the web, but more importantly I learned how to avoid them.  Cyber-attacks are growing and I think will only continue to grow so it is important to handle them in the safest way possible.