Introduction
As the internet users around the world are increasing day by day, a new fear has been a constant danger in the online world.
It is about cybercrimes.
To date, there have been many cases where the private data of the general public is leaked and sold in the open market.
Not only that, even some of the top companies such as Facebook have also fallen into the traps of the cyber threat.
A few years back, over 400 million Facebook users’ private data was exposed on the internet.
Most of us think of it as a minuscule issue.
To be honest, it is more than that. With your username and password, a hacker can access everything including your smartphones, PC’s camera, etc.
And as the internet is evolving in more and more developing countries, internet users are gradually increasing.
As a result, we must keep ourselves cyber secured.
In this new guide, I will tell you exactly why cybersecurity is significant and how you should keep yourself protected in this noisy online world.
Let’s jump in.
What Is Cyber security?
Cybersecurity is a process of safeguarding or defending oneself from the various cyber crimes that take place when you have access to the internet.
In short, cybersecurity helps you and your personal data stay encrypted online.
Due to the rapid evolution in internet history, a single user has countless applications installed on his/her device.
Though the play store and app store try their best to filter out the unwanted and illegal apps, yet there remain a few of them which can terminate everything.
One of the biggest examples of this can be a “Blue Whale” game. No one knew about the issues of this game until people started losing their lives due to it.
Without wasting more time, let me quickly go through some of the major reasons why cybersecurity is very important, especially today.
3 Reasons Why Cyber security Is Important
1. Cyber crime can cost huge losses –
Believe it or not, cybercrime is one of the most fearful and most awful virtual crimes in entire history.
With the blossoms of flowers that technology bought into existence, it also took on board some malicious viruses that can control many crucial functions.
Many businesses have incurred huge losses due to minor loopholes in their working system.
A hacker is a great planner. He knows everything about the company.
After performing its SWOT, he/she tries to inject some type of unique yet destroying soft wares into the company’s main databases.
This is how critical information is leaked.
And this is how millions of dollars are unethically transferred without any proof or evidence.
What makes these types of cybercrimes more prevalent?
As the internet is easily available, almost everything can be learned from it.
And due to it, many people misuse it by learning black hat hacking and so forth.
This makes the case more vulnerable.
2. Individuals may face ransom threats due to information leak –
Have you seen those villains kidnapping rich children and asking their parents for the money in some of the movies?
It is not limited to movies.
This is exactly what cybercrime may look like in real life.
Once a hacker gets to know one of your important details, then he/she can enter into your private internet life and mess up everything.
Though this practice has drastically reduced due to the advanced firewall and antivirus security in today’s scenario, yet it has not become zero.
This is harmful. It can not only harm you mentally, but you may never dare to access the internet again due to the fear of security issues.
One of the great examples of this is me.
When I was in early classes, I was very fond of playing games on mobile phones and one of my favorite ones was “Clash of Clans”.
As I was small, I didn’t know anything about cyber issues. So I shared my email id with one of the strangers on Facebook.
I didn’t share the password. But I shared my email id along with the game id.
Within minutes, I got a warning from google that read something like this – “account action required”.
I lost my game account. From that day, I got aware of the issues that one may face on the internet.
That’s why having at least rudimentary information about cyber security is vital.
3. The regulations are not as robust as they should be –
Let’s face it:
Many countries do not take cybersecurity seriously till today.
Many policies about health, transportations, etc will come out but no one will talk about the need for concrete cybersecurity.
I have seen nearly no newspaper, magazine, etc covering the true statistics about the same.
This is where the problem arises.
If the common man is not aware of these regulations, then how will he/she recognize what app to install and what to avoid?
Therefore, one should be kept up to date about such important areas.
In my opinion, schools and colleges should teach students about staying and browsing safe online.
With that out of the way, let me quickly point of two steps to keep yourself safe from cyber crimes?
How to Keep Yourself Secured from Cyber Crimes?
1. Never share sensitive information online –
Be it any social media username, important passwords, bank details, legal documents, etc, never share any of these with any random strangers.
Whenever someone asks for such information, gather optimum data about him/her to find out his expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
By doing so, no outsider will be able to play a trick on you easily.
2. Never visit any website that seems strange or is without an SSL certificate –
Whenever someone asks you to click on a certain website or a link, don’t do it before checking the domain name thoroughly.
I get too many spam emails and WhatsApp messages saying that “you have won X Million amount of money” and eventually try to grab our bank details.
Always remember, no one can give you millions of dollars just in the air.
Thus, avoid these junk messages.
It is better to stay harmless by not snapping on any of those links.
Tip: Only open websites that are SSL secured.
Conclusion
This was a beginner’s guide on cybersecurity and its importance.
Hopefully, you learned something new from his comprehensive guide.
It is easy to skip the important process of learning about cybersecurity and then regretting it after an irrecoverable loss.
Always be an aware citizen and most importantly, a benign internet operator.
This was all up to me.
Now, it’s your turn.
Tell me, how important is cybersecurity for you?
You can rate it out of 10 in the comments below right now.
