As we close out 2023, we at Security Boulevard wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2023.
If your social media networks are anything like mine, you’ve noticed an uptick in people getting “hacked” lately. Maybe you’ve gotten a weird Facebook message from someone you hadn’t spoken with in a while. Maybe your least tech-y friend is suddenly talking about crypto on Instagram. Or maybe you’ve seen post after post on your timeline of someone saying something like, “Sorry everyone, I got hacked!”
So what’s the deal? Why are your aunt and your favorite podcaster and that girl you went to high school with suddenly getting hacked? Isn’t that something that used to only happen to celebrities??
The short answer is: Every day people are easy and cheap targets for cyber criminals. Now let’s dig into the long answer.
Is everyone actually getting hacked?
First things first: Your aunt wasn’t hacked. She was phished, which is a different type of cyber crime. Hacking is defined as “the application of technology or technical knowledge to overcome some sort of problem or obstacle.” Hackers can have good intentions (like the ones we work with here at Avast) or they can have criminal intentions (like the ones who broke into Facebook in 2018). Regardless of intent, hacking requires a deep knowledge of technology and excellent programming skills.
Phishing, on the other hand, is a social engineering technique that manipulates people into voluntarily giving up sensitive information. Phishing scams can be simple (i.e. a message with a link saying “look who died”) or complex (i.e. a tech support scam) but they always utilize som ..
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