Date First Published: 12th June 2023
Topic: Cybersecurity
Subtopic: Threats To Systems, Data & Information
Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers
Difficulty: EasyDifficulty Level: 3/10
Learn about the top 10 scariest facts about the internet in this article. This is the 666th article.
The internet has become a very useful method of sharing files, resources, and other information with people all around the world. However, it is unfortunate that people also use it for malicious purposes, leading to some scary things that happen on the internet, like cybercrime, privacy violations, cyberbullying, offensive content, viruses, hacking, and more. The internet does also have a 'dark' side to it. Below are the top 10 scariest facts about the internet.
Hackers can hijack webcams to activate them remotely over the internet. All they need to do is install remote access malware on a computer. Almost any device with a camera, including a tablet, phone, desktop computer, or laptop could be taken over by a hacker by a malware infection. This will allow a hacker to spy on users and send recordings to a remote location without them knowing. It would be embarrassing if a video was recorded during a private time. Hackers could watch someone through their webcam without the indicator light on, which could result in terrible consequences. It may also take a while for the user to find out that their webcam has been hacked. The fear of webcam hijacking is the reason why some users cover their webcam or unplug it when it is not in use.
If a device has voice technology, data can get tracked by the manufacturer and employees. There are concerns that manufacturers and employees can listen in on private conversations without the user's permission. An employee or manufacturer may actually listen to recordings of someone's voice commands, which would be a privacy risk if their voice command contained personal information. This is why you should be careful when using voice search and only use reputable providers. Reputable providers will only listen to voice recordings with the user's permission to help train the responses of the digital assistants and voice recognition software.
Cyberstalking is a form of stalking that happens electronically over the internet or on a mobile phone. Cyberstalkers often rely on public sources of information to track people down and find out as much information as they can to target them for threats and follow them in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable, scared, or harassed. Cyberstalking is quite a scary thing and it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people experience cyberstalking every year, where someone constantly tries to monitor or follow them around on the internet.
Tracking users to display targeted ads to users based on their data and past behaviours, like what they have visited before is known as personalised advertising. Most advertisers only collect and use information about users on their own website so that ads can be targeted towards them on there, but some advertisers track people all around the internet on thousands of different websites using third-party cookies and sometimes IP addresses.
This can lead to hundreds of thousands of advertisers bidding on targeting ads towards people's sensitive information, like their financial status, health status, sexual orientation, political affiliation, personal race and ethnicity, religious beliefs, transgender identification, and relationship hardships. The ads will follow users around the Web based on all of this sensitive information and this has led to privacy concerns.
It is very unlikely that an executable file will run without your permission and getting infected with malware just by visiting a webpage in a web browser is getting rarer and rarer. However, there is still a small possibility of getting a virus or malware infection just from visiting a website by bugs and vulnerabilities. Especially if you use an old or outdated web browser or operating system, your computer might be vulnerable to unauthorised downloads from other websites. This is accomplished through a vulnerability which unknowingly downloads and installs things on your computer without your permission and is known as a drive-by-download. For more information on whether it is possible to get a virus just by visiting a website, see this article.
IP addresses could also be used by third parties for tracking the browsing habits of users, such as the pages they visited, what they visited before, the time that they have spent on the website, etc. This can leave a digital trail everywhere around the internet and display personalised ads, which some people feel is a privacy risk. To protect yourself against this, consider using a VPN, which will hide your real IP address by connecting to a server, encrypting traffic, and regularly changing it.
Some unreliable providers, particularly free providers, can sell your data to third parties that will misuse it and make tons of money from your personal data, including your first name, surname, email address, physical address, and more. Your personal data would basically be the product and data brokers could misuse it to commit fraud, publicly release it to a large audience without your permission, or use it to sign up for subscriptions or services in your name. That is why you should only ever give your personal information to reputable sites that you absolutely trust or else they might sell your data to third parties.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of passwords are stolen every week. Passwords can be stolen by all sorts of methods, including phishing, MITM attacks, pharming, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, brute-force attacks, keyloggers, and simply guessing the password.
Unless two-factor authentication is enabled, this will allow someone to gain unauthorised access to an account, which is very dangerous, especially if that account is used for electronic payment. If that stolen password has been reused, it becomes even more dangerous as the hacker might try the password on other popular services in the hope of correctly guessing it, which is why it is not recommended to reuse passwords across multiple sites. Someone could do anything that someone with that same level of access to your account could do, which is a great security risk. For more information on what makes a strong password, see this article.
You definitely shouldn't believe everything you read online. It is believed that over half of the information on the internet is false or misleading. Just because something has been posted on the internet, doesn't mean that it is true. Anyone can post something online and there isn't someone that fact checks everything before it goes online.
This is why it is important to consider which source you are reading something from and whether the website is legitimate or not before you decide to trust something you have read. If something you have read on the internet looks biased, suspicious, misleading, or completely incorrect, then it probably is. It could be that someone with very little knowledge of the topic rushed to write it without properly checking the facts or the article could be fake and designed to get a reaction out of you.
It is not uncommon for malicious websites that spread viruses and malware to come up in search engines when looking for downloads for software programs or applications. They may directly try to install malware or redirect to other sites that try to install malware. This is one of the most common ways that computers catch viruses and malware and that is why you should be very careful when searching for things like this. An example of this is a 2010 study by Google that discovered 11,000 domain names hosting fake antivirus software. This makes up for 50% of all malware delivered via internet advertising.
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