Save Your PC From Cyber Extortion

Tech Analyst Larry Magid Offers Tips To Protect Your PC

(CBS)  It’s a new twist on an old racket that’s haunted businesses for centuries -- “Give us money or we’ll shut you down.”

Or, they may be a bit more subtle -- “Pay us for protection against hoodlums, crooks and vandals.”

But the funny thing is, the guy collecting the money is closely associated with those very hoods he’s promising to protect you from.

Cyber extortion is very real and it can affect anyone from a major corporation to a mom and pop business. And, unlike those crooks from the hood, the perpetrators can be anywhere in the world.

The types of attacks vary but can include a denial of service attack (DOS), theft of confidential data or defacement of your Web site. Another more recent variation is an attack that locks up or encrypts your data. If you want to get access to your own information, you have to pay to have it unencrypted. Otherwise your precious data files could be nothing but binary gibberish.

There are technologies that help you recover from such an attack. But the cost can be quite high, says one security specialist.

“Some of these attacks have so much throughput we can get into $100,000 for a single attack,” said Barrett Lyon, Chief Technology Officer of Prolexic Technologies, a company that helps companies deal with these problems. The company offers a prevention and recovery service for enterprises starting at about $5,000 per month for most companies.

There was a time when an attack would come from a single machine located somewhere on the Internet. But these days they tend to come at you from multiple machines – possibly thousands of them – all at the same time. Such an attack is called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) because they attackers are distributed across the Internet.

Typically the machines that are doing the attacking are not operated by the perpetrator but by unaware individuals or businesses or organizations whose machines have been infiltrated either by a hacker or by a virus, worm or Trojan horse. Once a machine has been infected it can be turned into a zombie to attack other machines.

That’s why the federal government’s National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace urges everyone with an Internet connected computer to guard against attacks.

"Securing cyberspace is a difficult strategic challenge that requires coordinated and focused effort from our entire society—the federal government, state and local governments, the private sector and the American people," notes a report on cyber security from the agency.

Prevention is your best defense. In addition to services those offered by Prolexic and other security companies, organizations that maintain their own Web servers can purchase software that looks for and prevents “unusual” activity that may be associated with an attack.

Grogor Freund, Chief Technology Officer for Check Point Software, says his company’s industrial strength firewall software “in most cases proactively protects you from these types of attacks.”