As the internet grows the number of ways people have found to intrude into secure systems has grown as well. While writing malware started off as a form of displaying technology and system security, it has since become a tool for criminals to steal private information from both companies and individuals.
The growth of cloud-computing solutions offers developers the ability to scale their systems easily, without the overhead of buying and setting up their own custom machines. An issue that comes along with this is that cloud-computing has concentrated data on remote machines. This has attracted the attention of hackers, who can often find ways to infiltrate these remote machines by pretending to be the company who owns the data. Attacks are also often initiated by victims clicking a link or responding to a message sent by hackers. Around 90% of all emails sent in 2010 contained spam links. Hackers also sometimes engage in phishing, where they set up a website posing as a reputable company, in order to trick users into typing in their private info such as passwords or credit card info. Another common strategy hackers can use is called a drive-by download. Hackers do this by infecting public websites with malware that gets installed into users computers when they load the website on their own computer.
