Is it possible to secure your online data? In recent years both my wife and I have had our email accounts hacked. After a little troubleshooting and stronger passwords we were back in control of our accounts. Luckily for us it was just a bunch of spammers trying to sell electronics in my case and tell all my wife’s contacts that she was stuck in South Africa with no money to get home. As far as internet scams go, these were very tame.
When home based wifi networks began to take off the big fear was that your neighbor or some creep in a van with a laptop could hack into your network gaining access to all your data. Security experts warned people to start using stronger passwords as the WEP protocol was compromised, we were told to use the new more secure WPA standard. For a brief moment in time it felt safe to do our online banking and social networking in peace.
Gradually we were lulled in to a false sense of security. While we were looking for a suspicious looking van stealing our wifi, the real crooks had busied themselves hacking into merchants like TJX, the parent company of Marshall’s stores and had made off with over 11 million customers credit card data. A new era of large scale attacks were underway.
In recent months hackers have changed tactics once more, no longer are they breaking into servers for monetary gain, instead they’re doing it to further a political cause. When MasterCard and Visa refused to a process payments to the site Wikileaks, they were hit with a major denial of service attack.
Since then Sony Computers has had its gaming network hacked, and both the CIA and FBI websites have been targeted by Lulzsec. The political aims of hackers was taken to an extreme on July 4th 2011, when the Twitter account for Fox News was hacked and false accounts of the death of president Obama were tweeted out. The dangers of such account tampering have put the secret service on alert, at the speed that messages can go viral on Twitter, future false stories can endanger lives and reputations.
As we increasingly place more of ourselves online are we creating the perfect environment for hackers to steal everything in one swoop?
It seems there is no easy answer to stopping these malicious activities, if a major corporation can be hacked, how safe is an individual? The internet is an information super highway that allows all types of data to travel across it, unfortunately we have have to share the road with thugs and vandals.
Photo credit: Bonard
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