You can rob a bank without leaving

You can rob a bank without leaving your house these days. Who needs stocking masks . guns and getaway cars ? If you are a computer whiz-kid , you could grab your first million armed with nothing more dangerous than a personal computer, a telephone and a modern to connect them.

All you have to do is to dial into the networks which like the computers in large organizations together , type in a couple of passwords and you can rummage about in the information that is stored there to your heart’s content. Fortunately, it isn’t always quite as easy as it appears. But, as more and more information is processed and stored on computer, whether it is details of your bank account or the number of tins of baked beans in the stockroom at the supermarket , a computer crime seems set to grow.
A couple of months ago a newspaper reported that 5 British banks were being held to ransom by a gang of hackers who had managed to break into their computer. The hackers were demanding money in return for revealing exactly how they did it. In case like this, banks may consider paying just so that they can protect themselves better in the future.

As with anything else, hackers start young in States. A 12-year-old boy in Detroit was capable of entering a company’s credit rating computer and disturbing the numbers he found there. His mother told reporters that he spent up to 14 hours on his computer during the weekend.

Prevention is probably easier than detection, and many companies now spend lots of time and money devising programs using passwords and codes. Of course all this is no use whatsoever if computer users tell each other their password, stick it on their screen so they don’t forget it or use passwords like “ password” . It all happens. There are plenty of software companies which specialize in writing software that makes computers hack-proof. One company in the States set out to prove that its system can defeat hacker by asking over 2000 of them to try to hack it. The hackers were given 2 weeks to discover the secret message stored on 2 PCs in offices in New York and San Francisco . The message read : “ The persistent hunter who wins his prize sooner or later becomes the hunted.” You will be relieved - or perhaps disappointed - to learn that not any hacker managed it.