Technology drives just about everything we do, and not just at our jobs. From banks to hospitals to the systems that keep the juice flowing to our homes, we are almost entirely dependent on tech. More and more of these systems are interconnected, and many of them are vulnerable. We see it almost every day.
Fake antivirus programs that encourage Web users to part with their hard-earned cash and download hoax security software is likely to be the most costly scam of 2010, says McAfee.
According to the security firm, cybercriminals make upwards of $300 million from conning web users worldwide into downloading scareware.
The security firm also said it had seen a 660 percent rise in scareware over the pasantivirus scarewaret two years, and a 400 percent increase in reported incidents in the last 12 months.
It started with Michael Coppola taking things apart at the age of five: the remote control, his mother's house lamps, the family's VCR. He was curious about how things worked. By the time he was in fourth grade, he moved on to software. After building Web sites for his parents and their friends, Coppola, now 17, decided to try his hand at hacking. "When you have this passion for technology, you're not satisfied with knowing how to use something, you want to know how it works," he says.
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