Featured Image Credit: Adam Berry/Getty/Getty Stock Image
Topics: Reddit, Technology
Niamh Shackleton
A staggering amount of cyberattacks take place on a daily basis, however, one professional hacker has issued a handy piece of advice to protect yourself.
There have been some huge cyberattacks over the years, one of the biggest being Jonathan James' attack on NASA and the US Department of Defense (DOD) in 1999.
Just 15 years old at the time, James managed to instal a backdoor in the DOD's servers and intercept emails.
Advert
From there, he accessed the DOD's system to steal NASA's software that it was using to support the International Space Station.
After his illegal entry was discovered, NASA was forced to shut down its computers for three weeks.
James plead guilty to two counts of juvenile delinquency, leading to him being sentenced to six months in juvenile detention, as per The New York Times.
While cybersecurity has vastly improved since then, so has the abilities of those who hack into such systems.
With this in mind, someone who described themselves as a professional hacker has shared some tips on how to protect your personal data.
Taking to Reddit where they opened the floor to people's questions on all things cyber, one person asked: "What would you advise the average person in terms of security?"
The hacker replied: "Keep all sensitive information (passwords, seedphrase and so) on paper and away from online 3rd party digital storage. Don’t click on random links or download random files."
"Thanks so much for sharing, doing the Lord's work," one person went on to say.
Elsewhere, another person asked if the hacker had ever considered hacking a big company 'for your own profit'.
They said in response: "Short term profits are not worth your soul or your freedom."
While they aren't tempted to do take on such a huge and illegal hack, they did say that a lot of firms have 'garage security'.
Someone asked: "How often, do you find corporations that have pathetic security?"
They replied: "Very often, I’ve seen corporations worth over 200 million USD with garbage security."
Yikes.
Hackers are often coming forward to share their experiences in the illusive trade, with one guy sharing the scariest things he saw over his 30 years of doing it.
Touching on ransomeware and how it can be used at a high level, he said: "You have national state actors who are doing what they need to do because the nation state that they're employed by wants them to do it.
"There are financially motivated criminals who are looking for whatever way they can cash out, [and] there are some people who just want to see the world burn."
He added that some hackers 'just want to cause disruption' and that countries have a reason to 'weaponize' such attacks.
"It's the perfect form of asymmetric warfare," the experienced hacker added.