Cyber-security?

Mayank Gupta
2 min readDec 1, 2020

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Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

If you were to put a man, a thief specifically with limited morals and unlimited resource, alone in the vicinity of a locked safe, what are the chances that he would be able to crack it open?

Some might debate that various factors need to be considered to make an intelligent guess, but the only thing between the contents of the safe and that man might be the fear of being caught by the authority.

The case for cyber-security is something similar.

If you look closely, in case if a physical crime, various factors are at play; the location; the time; people around you; the tools you may have etc etc.

But in case of a cyber-crime, most of these can be marked down from the to-do list of a perfect crime.

In the new age of internet, the crime can be executed any time of the day, from anywhere in the world, without being noticed by the public.

And to top it all, there is no dearth of resources or knowledge that may prevent an ambitious man to pursue such a crime. The only other thing left to worry about is the fear of getting caught.

Morals too perhaps, but I am more inclined towards the idea that these mainly stem due to our fears of acceptance in the society.

Reading all of this may give you the impression that cyber-crime is potentially impossible to prevent and we can't really trust the lack of courage of the hacker for our safety.

But there is a certain catch to it. The thief we started with has to know that the expensive stuff that he is after is definitely in the locker that was given to him, in order for him to steal it.

With cyber-crime this power lies with you.

If you are vigilant enough you can prevent such a crime by just hiding where the locker is.

In English that means, keeping your accounts and personal data a secret if you do not wish for it to be exposed to the world. The less you share, the less vulnerable you might be from a breach.

It is not to say that don’t post your selfies on Instagram or brag about that trip to Mauritius on your Facebook stories, but simply DO NOT put your birthday or your cats name as the password.

Bonus: As a cyberthief, you also must be valuable enough for your data to be worthy of being stolen. For most of the internet users though who fill our drives with school assignments, vacation photos or grocery lists, your data wouldn’t be worth the effort; unless you happen to be Donald trump or the chief security in-charge of Apple servers, in both of which cases the company is going to take care of your security.

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