Naveronski said:
Well, no. On computers most problems are due to the user clicking on a malicious link or otherwise installing malware.
On cell phones the user is again the weak link.
You are correct that clicking on a malicious link is a serious problem. However, it is relatively rare that those malicious links are targeted at any one person. Sometimes they are, but usually they are automated attacks against large numbers of harvested addresses without being targeted at anyone in particular.
For example, I get plenty of e-mails daily to my IANA contact address. By about 1997 or so, that e-mail address was getting so much spam that it became unusable. I still have the address but have not been able to use it in years. In the last ten years, I've probably received only one or two legitimate e-mails to it of the hundreds of thousands it has received. It's hard to imagine those e-mails being targeted at me.
Another route is via home or small office routers. What most people don't realize is that home routers/firewalls are not very secure which makes the routers/firewalls a prime target for hackers. Many routers/firewalls, even very expensive commercial firewalls, have been found to have embedded usernames and passwords which allow anyone who knows them to connect. Once the router has been breached, then the attacker usually has easy access to anything and everything behind the router/firewall.
And, for what it's worth, a great many of the router attacks are automated and aren't directed at any particular targets. Sure, if you want to break into XYZ Ball Bearings, then you might go after their router.
Some years ago, a customer of ours had a router visible to the Internet. One day, that router got hit. It then started trying to hit other routers in our address space. Fortunately, we caught the attack within an hour and were able to stop it with only about six routers hit. Under no circumstances are any router of that brand allowed to be visible to the Internet any more. Nobody was directing the attack against any particular targets.
In another case, we connected one company to the Internet and from the start they were running about 60 megabits per second constantly. We quickly determined that one computer at that site was scanning blocks of addresses for open rdp (Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol) services. This went on non-stop until we collected the data that we needed and started blocking all rdp traffic to and from their IP address. The targets were all over the place. Their port scanning was automated searching for vulnerable sites.
So yeah, if you are a celebrity or the company is an attack target for some reason, then there is a good chance that someone is directing the attack at you. In the vast majority of cases, the attackers are not targeting you directly.
