Even baseball teams are hacking their rivals now. And the latest series in the CSI television franchise? CSI: Cyber, starring Patricia Arquette and Ted Danson. .... (the best antivirus software catches only 5% of online threats; 80% of hackers work for organized crime rings) ..... Chinese irons and teakettles that were illicitly outfitted with Wi-Fi cards, allowing the appliances to secretly join their owners’ home networks and spread viruses and spam. ..... killer robots to plagues that are genetically engineered to attack a specific person (say, a sitting head of state) ........ researchers were able to identify specific people in anonymized data sets by using “a receipt, an Instagram post, and a Tweet about a new purchase or a Facebook post that included the location of a favorite bar or a restaurant.” ....... the United States, unlike many other countries, doesn’t classify privacy as a human right; instead, its laws tend to address privacy only after it’s been violated—in the wake of a data breach, for example. So we are exposed to anyone with the know-how and the inclination to violate it, including our own government. ...... hackers can change their tactics far faster and more easily than we can update our defenses ..... They can sidestep security simply by changing their IP addresses or adding a few lines of code to their malware, and they relentlessly pick apart apps, websites, and devices to find security holes they can exploit. New ways to steal your money and personal information are being dreamed up as you read this. ........ Cybersecurity books are a 20th-century solution to a 21st-century problem, and the solution isn’t working .... far too many people are still using passwords such as “123456” and “password,” and cybercrime is worse than ever. ..... The bad guys are already working together, whether through a catalog of common internet-of-things devices and how to hack them, the live tech support that attends one of the most nefarious malware packages, or the organized cybercrime rings themselves.
So much is happening online. There's much behind firewalls, but hackers have ended up everywhere before. Worms come down to your desktop, and if you are lucky you get to retrieve your work. Recently a teen spread a worm on Twitter. What's next? Gmail? So it is not like the cloud is sacred territory. There is no sacred territory.
There are rogue individuals, pranksters, spammers, spam spewing companies. Then there are the evil ones. They want your computer down. They want your system down. They want to steal your password, your credit card number. They show up in your inbox hoping to lure you to click on something or the other. It is a numbers game for them. They are counting on very few people to click, and those very few routinely do.
But what about hostile states and terrorist organizations? If the Al Qaeda wants to explode a dirty bomb, does it not fantasize of cyber attacks? It has recruited smart doctors before. Could it recruit hackers? What could a cyber cold war look like? What about a hot one?
For the most part we are counting on the good people in the information technology sector to stay numerous and to always stay one step ahead of the evil ones. We are counting on the market forces. But when it comes to global law enforcement coordination, we are as ill-prepared as on a host of other global issues. People in finance talk of tax havens. There are hacker havens all over the world. We count on hackers being not smart enough to create and spread the next deadly worm. But they routinely do. We keep building up the immune system, we keep finding cures for diseases, kind of like for the biological types over history.
And safety is not all about technology. It is also about criminals going high tech to commit crimes they were already committing before the internet came along.
Just like for global finance, for global terrorism, for global warming, there is ultimately only a global solution to cyber security. Cyber security has to be approached from many different angles if it is to be meaningfully tackled.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uAXh1rEP7dvXD_GG3bWC7w0IZMZnQDbaG1yW2Vf_vZmucZbwoXZqyOCo9N8uxa5HzDzRZ-nRKepghBiup1n0DxxsYA8lT-ChKpZnaQp3R-UvpH4ZYOuAyiMsYg3tlrsVLw_SC-rauIg3IDEtm4I0A=s0-d)