Presentation Post

Cybersecurity

Recently me and the other students of our information technology (presented) presentations on different types of technology, and we were instructed to present something that most of us were not aware of or very educated about. The other aspect of this particular assignment was to blog about another student’s presentation that as presented on a different day than the day that you had your presentation. I must say that out of all of the very interesting presentations “Cybersecurity” was the topic that fully seized my attention.

With that being said, whenever I am interested in something like to do a little research of the subject on my own, so I looked up cybersecurity and a few of the topics that were included in the presentation. I found that Cybersecurity can be defined as “the body of technologies, processes and practices designed to protect networks, computers, programs and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access.” (TargetTech.com) I also found that one of the most problematical rudiments of cybersecurity is the rapidly and continuously progressing nature of security risks. I must say that this makes an abundance of sense to me. Especially at the rate in which technology is moving and not necessarily improving simultaneously.

Another attributes of the cybersecurity presentation that caught my attention was the story about “Max Ray Vision”. According to wired.com the “skilled San Francisco computer intruder was sentenced here to 13 years in federal prison for stealing nearly two million credit card numbers from banks, businesses and other hackers — in what is the longest hacking sentence in U.S. history”. Furthermore, he was also ordered to pay $27.5 million in restitution, and to serve five years under court supervision following his release, during which time he was allowed to use computers only for legitimate employment or education.

As I continued to read this article I thought, “was the risk worth the reward?” I do not know about most people but restitution bill of $27.5 million sounds like a heart stopping event to me. So I just had to find out how much Max Vision was making during his cyber-crime spree and I found that he was caught with 1.8 million stolen credit card numbers belonging to a thousand different banks, who tallied the fraudulent charges on the cards at $86.4 million. I could not help but to think about all of the hard working innocent people who were burned. I guess my question would be, “how did he stay so far ahead of the law?”. I mean that is a lot of money and a lot of people.