Data theft is one of the scariest things that can happen as a result of a hack. Loss of personal data can get small medical offices (like dentists, aestheticians, and chiropractic offices) sued out of business for mishandling of PPI. Losing employee tax data on a virus is its own unique headache, as the employee often needs identity theft protection plus extra safeguarding to ensure nobody tries to worm in between them and their paycheck, seeing as many businesses deposit checks electronically. The list goes on. Simply put, data theft sucks!
But, there are other reasons a hacker might want to get onto your device, even if there isn’t any data to be snatched from it. What else are they getting up to?
One of the scandals of the BitCoin age was malware designed to use your computer’s resources to mine BitCoin for someone else, without you knowing. This, of course, requires a download, so possible attack vectors would have been things like downloadable programs outside the official Microsoft app store, things like games and browser extensions. Since the operation was happening in the background, the user might notice their computer slowing down and heating up, but not figure out exactly why until diagnostics were run and the BitCoin miner was discovered.
Other things malware might do outside of direct data theft includes spying on you. ‘Spyware’ includes a wide swath of program behaviors. Depending on who’s defining ‘spyware’, for example, the Facebook app (which interacts with tons of other apps on your phone and is usually aware of your location, job, education level, age, hobbies, and friend circle) could be called spyware, and plenty of people still use that despite the invasive permissions. Facebook does ask you to agree to these terms in their TOS when you sign up, and maybe that makes the difference between legitimate apps and spyware? BonziBuddy, a desktop pet that would talk and sing for you, did not disclose that it was tracking the computer user, and as such the people who made it got sued into oblivion.
Adware is another potential problem divorced from direct theft. Ever have popups start appearing on your screen, usually for shady supplements or websites you’d never want to visit? In the olden days, downloading ‘free’ games or other programs was even more of a crapshoot, and on the luckier side you’d end up with a program serving you ads next to the one you actually intended to download. Luckily, this has died down somewhat – ads are everywhere, so you don’t need to port them directly to the desktop – but they haven’t gone totally extinct.
Avoiding malware can feel tricky. You want to download things, and maybe you’re not entirely certain where to find safe downloads outside the obvious platforms like Steam, or Apple’s app store, both of which vet downloadables before they go live. If you’re a little more savvy, you might feel safe downloading programs like Blender or LibreOffice directly from their websites. Other places, though? Like Itch.io, a platform that offers a variety of downloads, but extremely limited vetting? It can be tough to tell. I doubt there’s anyone who’d ever have a 100% success rate of downloading everything that caught their eye without also downloading malware.
Luckily, these things have a hard time getting past both you and Microsoft Defender (or Apple’s MacOS)… but it’s possible, especially if the virus’s creator was sneaky about it and hid it in a game download, something that Microsoft would prompt you to accept changes to your device for anyway. If you’re looking to protect business devices from problems like this, contact us – we can hook you up with management software that prevents malicious downloads by alerting an admin to take a closer look at it.
Check out some of our offerings here: https://elixistechnology.com/cybersecurity/
