Well in this era of internet data is the most valuable thing and from big to corporate giants to government organization everyone wants our data. Data is valuable for useful information which have certain groups interest. Along with that the internet it self is a place which was born with no security concern and it’s a place for free movement. As a result it also contain all kind of users (normal innocent user to serious criminal). This might sounds judgmental yet it is a free place (free stands for freedom). So our data is important for everyone and it is valuable. However, it is most valuable to us. So who are those certain group that do have interest on our data:

  1. Government: As we are in Germany the government do care about data privacy and protection under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law. However, if an user doing something illegal say for example downloading something from Torrent or doing something illegal deals on dark web (e.g. drug dealing, child porn, weapon dealing and so on) the government agencies and certain law farms might show interest on that particular user. Many Governments like Chinese Government or Russian Government go more violent way and they even don’t respect data privacy of their local user and always monitor if anyone talking against the government or posting something which is against the governments ideology. So, to protect oneself, it is necessary to protect your valuable data even when you are sending your homework from school to a friend or an email to family.
  2. Script Kiddies: The script kiddies are some kids they doesn’t know much quiet amateur in the field of IT and quite young who is interested about hacking and so on. They mostly called script kiddies because they learn stuffs from YouTube or Google and find those cool scripts and tools made by others and use them just for fun. They are not professional and not as skilled as a professional programmer or hacker. They can’t write their own scripts sometimes. The main thing they can do well just put a ransomware and ask for money. Easy money 😛

    (Image source: pexels.com, free to use license)
  3. Scammer: The scammers always wants our data and try to blackmail us encrypting them out and want money. Unlike Script kiddies they have proper plans and so on. Script kiddies give up so easily as it’s just some fun projects from YouTube they have learned or from Github they got this simple piece of code or script. If situation gets difficult they just gives up where scammers always come and sends email or get into our network saying “FreeWiFi” or giving use “free movie or Free games to download”, sometimes even they pretend to be a safe user. However, they are hostile which we don’t know. They also might want your credit card or bank information or maybe say you want to goto amazon but behind they might take you to amaz0n.de which isn’t the real amazon that we trust. And on some cases this scammer could be your research partner and wants to still your intellectual property and claiming it as their own. Or maybe because of jealousy they might encrypt your whole machine and you can’t work on your years old project or all of the datasets is just gone!

    (Image source: pexels.com, free to use license)

So, to protect ourselves from such hostile users, we can use something more secured like VPN(Virtual Private Network), encrypted Emails (gmx.de, proton mail and so on), encrypted messaging tools like Signal or Theema. However, today’s topic was to introduce everyone which the VPN.