NBC was hacked this week in what's being called a “drive by” cyberattack.  No, it wasn’t Anonymous, and no, it was not a prank.  This hack was serious business, and if you visited the NBC website, including including related sites for “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and “Jay Leno's Garage” during the infected period — all day Thursday through 4pm Friday — your bank account might be at risk. Not only that, NBC is not the only website recently infected with this insidious malware.

You may have thought you were safe from viruses. After all, you do your best to avoid bit-torrent sites, you only watch tv shows on network sites or Hulu, and you never visit XXX sites. That’s where all the viruses are, right? Wrong. Online criminals have been getting more and more audacious with their exploits. A lot of high-profile sites that you wouldn’t expect to be spreading viruses have been compromised recently.  Facebook, Twitter, Apple just to name a few, as well as Twitter accounts for Burger King and Jeep, which compromised just this week. The attacks on Facebook, Twitter and Apple were fortunately not intended to install crimeware on user computers, but the attack on NBC was.

Crimeware Is malicious software written by internet criminals for internet criminals.  Crimeware makes it easier for less experienced computer hackers to engage in criminal activity to steal your personal information or even your money, through exploits like the one discussed here through Java.  You probably wouldn’t even know about it until it was too late.

So, what should you do? Turn off your computer? Disconnect your internet? Well there are less drastic ways to deal with the situation. First, monitor your bank account and credit report and raise a red flag if there are any charges or activity that you did not initiate. Secondly, make sure that your anti-virus software is always up to date and that automatic scanning is turned on. Lastly, never access your personal information from a computer or device that you are unfamiliar with. If you don’t know where a computer has been, don’t let it near your banking or personal information.