Hi, my name is Jenny Martin and I'm the

director of cybersecurity investigations at Symantec.

Today cybercrime causes huge problems for society

personally, financially, and even

in matters of national security.

Just in the last few years, hundreds of millions of credit card numbers have been
stolen,

tens of millions of Social Security

numbers and healthcare records were compromised,

even nuclear centrifuges

that have been hacked,

and unmanned aerial drones have been hijacked.

This is all done by exploiting vulnerabilities

in hardware and software or more often

by taking advantage of unintentional

decisions made by the people using the software.

The people committing these cyber crimes

don't fit a single profile or motivation.

It could be anyone from an international terrorist to a teenager competing for

bragging rights.

Today the largest countries not only have a regular army

but also have a well armed cyber army.

In fact, the next World War may not be

fought with traditional weapons, but with

computers used to shut down national

water supplies, energy grids, and

transportation systems.

Hi my name is Parisa and

I'm Google's Security Princess.

I've worked on a lot of different Google products

in a lot of different ways to try and
make our software as secure as possible.

Now let's take a look at how cybercrime

works under the hood.

We'll learn about software viruses,

denial-of-service attacks, and phishing scams.

In biology and life, a virus is an

organism that is spread by coughing,

sneezing, or physical contact.

Viruses work by infecting cells,

injecting their genetic material, and

using those cells to replicate.

They can make people really sick and then spread to other people.

A computer virus works bit similarly.

A
virus is an executable program that gets

installed, usually unintentionally,

and harms the user and their computer.

It's also possible for a virus to spread itself to other

computers.

Now how does a virus get on your

computer in the first place?

There are a couple ways an attacker can

infect someone's computer.

They might lure a victim into

installing a program with deception about the

program's purpose, so for example a lot

of viruses are disguised as security updates.

It's also possible that the software on your computer has a vulnerability, so an
attacker can install itself

without even needing explicit permission.

Once a virus is on your computer it can
steal or delete any of your files,

control other programs, or even allow

someone else to remotely control your computer.

Using computer viruses, hackers can take

over millions of computers world wide

and then use them as a digital army, otherwise known as a botnet, to attack and
take down websites.

This kind of attack is called a

distributed denial of service.

A denial of service is when hackers

overwhelm a website with too many requests.

We call it a distributed denial-of-service when the attack comes from many

computers all at once.

Most websites are ready to respond to

millions of requests a day, but if you

hit them with billions or trillions of requests,

coming from different places,

the computers are overloaded and stop

responding.

Another trick used by cybercriminals is to send large amounts of spam email in an

attempt to trick people

into sharing sensitive personal information.

This is called a phishing scam.

A phishing scam is when you get what seems like a

trustworthy email asking you to log

into your account, but clicking the email

takes you to a fake website.

If you log in anyway, you've been

tricked into giving your password away.

Hackers can then use your login

credentials to access your real accounts

to steal information or maybe even to

steal your money.

Fortunately there are

many companies, laws, and government

organizations working to make the

internet safer, but these

efforts are not enough.

You may think when a computer system

gets hacked the problem was the security

design or the software.

Ninety percent
of the time the system gets hacked

however, it's not because of the security bug, but because of a simple mistake made
by a human.

It turns out there are steps we

can all take to protect ourselves.

Often your actions not only impact the

security of your own data and computer, but the

security of everyone at your school,

workplace, and home.

With billions or
trillions of dollars at stake,

cybercriminals get smarter each year and

we all need to keep up.