Which personal data is appealing to cyber criminals?
- Date: 28 July, 2020
Facebook, Instagram and Github - we use all sorts of social networks and share our personal data without giving it a second thought. Which information is useful to cyber criminals? Learn from expert Erik van der Leek in this article.
Imagine: you become the victim of a cyber criminal. He or she has got access to your personal data, social media accounts and pictures. Maybe he or she even has access to your company computer.
Valuable information
Cyber criminals try to steal valuable data from people like you and me. This information can be valuable right away - when the cyber criminal gets his or her hands on personal data or credit card information for example. But data can also be a starting point for larger attack, on a computer network for example, or it gives the cyber criminal access to a place they can launch an attack from later on.
Which data is valuable to a cyber criminal?
- Personal accounts and passwords
- Your e-mail address
- Your IP address
- Data on domains
- Social media networks
- Your private address
- Work data
- Data on Family and friends
- Data from your online dating profiles
Does the cyber criminal need advance skills?
How complicated is it to gain all this data from a person? Does it require advanced hacking skills?
The answer is no. All this information can be found somewhere on the internet. By internet we mean the internet we use every day, the deep web (databases and meta data) and the Dark Web (known to contain more criminal activity).
On this combination of different webs, you can find more personal information about people and companies than people realize. Often, you don't need complicated techniques to get to this information. Once you know where to start, you can find lots of information.
Learn more
During the online workshop Digital Investigations, I'll dive deeper into online research. I'll show you it's relatively easy to find personal information on the regular internet. We find this information by using query's, meta data, images and python search scripts.
During this workshop, you'll work with query's and I will help you come up with smarter search terms and custom search engines. You can get access to this workshop with the Summer Knowledge Pass. Book the Summer Knowledge Pass via the button below.
