Cybercrime: Hacking Goes Way Beyond Simple Identity Theft | Marc Goodman | Big Think

Technology can be used against us in ways that we don’t understand. Most people in our modern society have become expert users of technology, but they have no idea how things operate under the hood. This is true of all generations, particularly with millennials. People think millennials are great with tech, and it’s true they’re expert users. But when it comes to understanding the science of technology, the computer science, and the electrical engineering that goes into making a particular app work, most people are clueless.

And the challenge of that is that there are people in our world who know how technology works. The people who create those tools out in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and then other people who take the time to educate themselves. Whether it be people who have studied it professionally or on their own, but in particular, even criminals, terrorists, and rogue governments have worked on these tools, decompiled them, and deconstructed them. The fact of the matter is most criminals understand your iPhone better than you do and can use it against you.

When people think of cybercrime or computer crime, they always think of the basics. "My credit card number got hacked. My identity was stolen." That type of stuff. It’s so common these days to tap into most people at one point in their life or another. But there are so many other things that criminals can do with technology that the average person wouldn’t even realize. So let’s take your mobile phone, for example.

There was an Android exploit that came out recently called Stagefright, and just by sending a text message to an individual on an Android phone, anybody who read those messages or clicked on the links, their mobile phone could be taken over in an instant. The fascinating thing about it is that it affected one billion Android users across the world. So just one hacker could have taken over a billion Android devices.

And once they have access to the devices, not only can they read everything that you type, get access to your entire address book, see every photograph, private or not, that you may have ever taken on your phone. They can get access to all your social media accounts, capture your email address, and your log on credentials and password for all of your financial apps, for your bank accounts, investment accounts, and the like. And they can even track you physically in the world and know where you are at any particular time. So they can track your physical location.

Moreover, they can actually remotely turn on your microphone and your phone’s video cameras without you knowing it. So the way that these exploits work, you would see no indication on your phone that it is in fact recording; it’s being turned against you. It’s become a bug and can transmit all of your conversations 24/7 to hackers. And they can even go ahead and surreptitiously take over your camera.

In fact, not just on your mobile phone, but of course the very same things are true on your computers. We’ve had many, many people have their laptop cameras hacked, and they didn’t even realize it. A famous case occurred about a year and a half ago where a young woman, 15 or 16 years old, I think she was 16, was Miss Teen America. A young lady by the name of Cassidy Wolf.

So she was obviously very attractive, Miss Teen America. And one day, sitting in her bedroom on her laptop, she opened it up and saw an email that came in. And underneath the email were a bunch of pictures of her naked in her own bedroom. And there was a message attached that said, "You better have sex with me on camera or I’m going to release all of these pictures and post them on your Facebook profile and the like and share them across your social media."

She freaked out, didn’t realize what happened, slammed down the laptop, and then she did something very, very important. Rather than ignoring it or exceeding to the extortionist's request, she told her parents who brought in the FBI and investigated. And they found out after several months of investigation that it was actually one of her classmates who had sent her an email message. She clicked on the link that downloaded malware onto her computer which gave him access to her whole machine.

So the young girl didn’t do anything wrong. Her laptop was just in her bedroom, and the fact that it was open, that she was coming in and out of her bathroom after taking a shower, he was able to capture these photographs.