Cybercrime: what it is and how to prevent it

We often hear the word “cybercrime“, an increasing phenomenon that can put under risk our sensitive datas, but even our money.

Like recently happened in Florida, the Country had to pay 1,1 million of dollars in bitcoin to take back the files after a ransomware attack, the informatic system had a down for just 10 minutes, but during those 10 minutes it was possible to block accounts and servers of the employees of two cities: Riviera Beach and Lake City.

Under attack anyway there aren’t only the biggest companies, the cybercrime even often targets the small and medium companies until arriving to the single person.

But let’s find out exactly what the cybercrime is, because to better prevent a problem is useful to know all of its shadows.

What the Cybercrime is

With the word cybercrime are grouped all the crimes made in the web. Specifically it’s all the criminal activities developed through technological instruments, both hardware and software.

There is a huge variety of possible informatic attacks and today we can distinguish even 14 kinds of them, from the crimes like simple virus online, to the identity’s theft, until the industrial espionage.

It’s possible to divide them in two big categories.

The first one it’s about the usage of the informatic technology to make abuses like spam or malware. The second one instead includes cyberstalking, informatic frauds, creation of fake identities or phishing.

The integration in our penal code happened mainly by trying to materialize the crime, which means checking the connections of the online crime with crimes that already existed. For example by getting closer the not autorized access to a web site with the home invasion.

The datas of the 2018

It’s estimated that 5.200 billion of dollars is the amount of the damages made by the cybercrime only in the 2018 in the whole world. The research center Accenture listed a report, by making an investigation between more than 1.700 CEOs and top managers all around the world.

Specifically in Europe and especially in Italy, the situation is far away than peaceful. The european average of the informatic attacks (according a report of Kaspersky) is of one company on two, by bringing Europe to a 54% of attacks per years.

On the top of the european league we find Great Bretain and Spain which arrive to 64%, the german companies that instead accuse at least one informatic attack every two years are the 49%, but who seems to be more safe is the Romanian with “only” the 37% of attacks.

And where is Italy in this dramatic scenario of online crimes? With our 55% we are in the middle of the league, lined with the european average.

The report says that to be more affected by the informatic attacks are the big companies, the situation for the small and medium companies is better. The attacks are especially about the stop of the services which arrive to the 31% of the cases, the 18% of the technological crimes are focused on sensitive datas and informations with a 15% of total lost of the informations.

How to prevent the cybercrime?

The aspect on which the companies maybe should invest more is the prevention, the fight against the hackers can be made on two sides.

The first one, that seems surely the most logic one, is the one to intensify the protections to avoid unwanted entries. So well made firewall and antivirus always upgraded will disadvantage direct or indirect attacks.

The second one instead is about an aspect that often is understimated, which is the importance to do the backup. We are less vulnerable if at the moment of the attack it’s possible to autonomously restore all the datas, without need to pay to have them back.

It’s useful so rely on a cloud backup, datacenter and servers of restore on detached networks.

About the people we need to make attention about which datas we share and on which sites, always having copies of backup of the most important files, and to upgrade the safety systems even on the smartphone.

This post is also available in: Italiano