Research and Describe Why Do Hackers Want Your Credentials - 550 Words

Research and Describe Why Do Hackers Want Your Credentials? (Research Paper Sample) Content: Why Do Hackers Want Your Credentials?Students NameInstitutional AffiliationsWhy do Hackers Want Your Credentials?We are habitual creatures who have favorite items in our day to day life, for example a coffee cup, or a pen, and maybe even a book. How does it feel when someone steals your favorite pen? This is enough to ruin your whole day, it is even worse when somebody makes off with your book. Now, picture this, a hacker has breached a certain site and got your email account plus its password. They may supply your credentials into an automated tool that will automatically run them against a site they have targeted to see if they work. This may work because we mostly use similar passwords for our accounts. Say, for instance, they access your social media account, and do whatever they are willing to do with it, or worse, they get an access to your bank account, they will have the ability to transfer your money to an account of their choice. This way, your account has b een hacked maliciously, and you wonder how it happened. This is known as credential stuffing (Lewis, 2017).When financial information is successfully in hackers hands, they use it in their own individual ways; they can borrow loans, transfer money to other accounts they have created, pay bills and other transactions. The victims finances are greatly impacted; it ruins ones credit card rating. When emails and social media accounts are hacked, a hacker can steal and even post in the accounts of the victim. This will lead to losses and a bad public image of the victim, because even his or her private and confidential information like photographs or videos might be leaked to the public.What do these hackers have in their sleeves? They use tricks, and these three are their favorite: reusing passwords leaked from other sites, brute force (a bot is used to attempt log ins using weak passwords), and finally phishing (Milner, 2016). Once the hacker has your data, it is run through the follow ing steps; its inventory (looking for personal information and credentials), selling it (the hacked information is packaged and sold in bulk), look for the helpful information (the hacked accounts with greater value are the main targets), offload the cards (example credit card numbers, they are sold to carders who use them to buy goods from stores or Amazon.com, and then sell them through dark websites or eBay), selling them in bulk (the authentication credentials are then bundled up and sold at discounted price). Hackers earn loads of money from these steps (Secplicity, 2017).Examples of recently hacked accounts are like the blog of MSNBCs Joy Reid, it was allegedly hacked and homophobic content got added to the site. Hackers may sometimes use viruses, which cost companies and countries great...