Cybercrime: Big Brother is indeed watching

Broadly defined, cybercrime is defined as crime that involves a computer and a network that may threaten a person or a nation’s security and financial health.

Friday’s attack on networked institutions across the globe is a severe and serious example of this attached, as it was, to a demand for payment to nullify the crippling virus – called ransomware – invading these banks of information.

The increasing reliance the world has placed on technology to speed up and take the drudgery out of day-to-day results has opened an unhealthy, immoral and highly illegal portal to access this information by the hackers and – as is the case with Britain’s already seriously deficient national health service (NHS) – bring it virtually to its knees.

Security firms have reportedly continually raised alarms about the NHS’s reliance on Windows XP, an operating system that is no longer supported by software colossus Microsoft.

But in an age where computer technology advances by quantum leaps on a almost daily basis, commercial concerns tend to dominate a field where mega-fortunes beckon. It is, in short, a world where no one’s information – or secrets – can ever be truly secure.

The past has caught up and Big Brother is indeed watching you.

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