What Would a Hacker Want with my PC?

I review SANS Internet Storm Center everyday to try and keep up with the current “bad guy” happenings that the Internet Storm Center reports back. They are a source of sharing information with the Security Community and let you know what is happening currently. The Storm Center has somewhere around 40 people who rotate 24 hour shifts and it is manned continually. The link I have in the first line of this post is the story I’m using as my source for this posting.

Have you ever asked the question, what would a hacker want with my PC? You may not bank online and you may not shop online, but you need to know what a hacker sees in your PC. Kevin Liston wrote this post to remind us that when you have a presence on the Internet, you do have things of value to the criminal mind. You have a CPU, Memory, Hard Drive, and an Internet access/IP address. From using your PC as a bot that the criminal can control, to your hard drive where they can store pirated files or even child pornography, to an IP that hasn’t been blacklisted.

If you’ve ever thought that “no hacker wants anything on my PC”, look at your PC as an asset that can be used to the hacker’s advantage to gain financially over possibly you, or others. Ignorance is your enemy. Hopefully, if you are reading this for the first time, you will come back for more knowledge.