WHY SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED ABOUT IT?
The most common and serious danger presented by any of these threats is identity theft. Identity theft often goes unnoticed until serious damage is done, and the consequences can be dire and difficult to untangle. It’s tough to even know when or how your identity was compromised. It can cost you thousands of dollars, destroy your credit rating, and if it goes unnoticed long enough, end in serious legal trouble for you and your family.
In some cases, if an identity is going to be used to cover a criminal or terrorist action, it is helpful for the original owner of an identity to disappear or die suddenly. This does not happen often, but it is not unheard of, and the organizations that stand to gain the most from trade in reliable fake identities would certainly not hesitate to kill someone if it meant making a little extra cash.
The worms that infect your computer, capture information, and enslave it to a botnet can corrupt files and even disable or destroy hardware. They are insidious, difficult to detect, and often impossible to destroy. Military-grade software is fantastically complex and obscenely powerful, and no consumer-grade antivirus software has a hope against it. Even the stuff fielded by the Russian mafia is pretty top of the line—Internet security companies are in an ongoing war against large online criminal organizations. Many of them even regularly fend off active assaults on their own networks.
The criminals that prey on those wandering the wild Internet are determined, intelligent, well funded, well equipped, and vicious. They exist in fluid, anonymous organizations that can disappear in an instant, reinvent themselves, and be back online within hours.