You might think that since you use a personal laptop at home, and not a computer at a cafe, you are safe from hackers. Well, think again. Hackers don't even need to have physical access to your computer to be privy to all the information it contains.
Which could mean that every transaction carried out on your computer is being noticed somewhere, and somebody has access to your e-mail password, credit card numbers, bank credentials and other sensitive personal information, without you knowing it.

The hazard has grown over the years, and flourished unabated through social networking sites, particularly because of bots', a type of malware that allows an attacker to gain complete control over the computer. "Bots allow hackers to take control of many computers at a time, and turn them into zombie' computers, which operate as part of a powerful botnet' to spread viruses, generate spam, and commit other types of online crime and fraud," explains Rishi Aggarwal, president of the Lonavla-based Anti-Hacking Anticipation Society (HANS). "These bots are like robots and operate on Artificial Intelligence. Once programmed, they work on their own, without the hacker's intervention."