RAM Scraping Attack

These things are just mean. They're the A-List of hacker attempts to control your computer, create chaos in the world and rerun TV episodes of Pinky and The Brain.

Okay, first: RAM: "random access memory." But basically, think of it as one of the two ways in which computers store data. There's the cloud, and there are hard drives, and ancient, scuzzy drives, the kind that rotate like an LP player to find data. That's not RAM. That's hard drive space. RAM is the "I need it now!" space that houses data which is sort of interstitial. Like, think: stuff you've typed on your screen, but hasn't yet had the benefit of a return key. Or documents you've opened and are monkeying with, but are sitting there, stored in the D-RAM of your little local computer.

So what else is probably accessible up there? Yeah, your password. Your cookie info. Your predilection for certain, um, "art film" websites. In a scraping attack, a hacker copies and pastes that information from your D-RAM onto her hard drive, and you likely don't even realize it until, well...bad things happen to good people all the time.

How do you prevent these? Eh, you don't. If a world-class hacker wants to get at your data, little will stop them. You can put firewalls and VPNs and change your passwords often and make life difficult for them. But in the scheme of all the things that most world-class hackers can do with their time, you have to ask yourself, "Am I that interesting or powerful that they actually care about scraping my RAM?" And when you answer, "No," you can go back to your regularly scheduled programming.