Computer and information security, a phrase that you may only hear in university courses or in the cover of some IT magazine that you’re looking at while waiting for your turn to pay at the supermarket. You hear it and may think they’re talking about some new “antivirus” or a new way of preventing the Chinese and Russians from spying conversations with their computers, but most importantly, that you don’t give a damn, because YOU have a password with more than 8 characters, a digit and a sign; you don’t click on pop-ups, and you ignore the “Viagra” mails on your inbox. You live a humble life away from all danger, why should you be worried? Well, after reading this post, you might wanna put another sign to that password.
When you hear the word security you immediately think of locks, closed doors, guys with guns in the entrance of a building and 24/7 surveillance cameras; and, to a certain point, you’re correct, but why do you need a tall, expressionless big guy standing next to a door? Let me answer that for you: because you wan’t to protect something. You want that the thing behind that door stays there, safe from all harm, secure; and that also applies to all your electronic devices and data.
Lets put some context into it and state all the important things you might wanna keep from others: browser history, conversations, photos, schedules, bank account’s information, medical records, friends and family name,etc.. Why? What could anyone do with that information? Steal physical and intellectual property, blackmail, impersonate as you (this may result on you being accused of a crime you didn’t commit), harm any friends and family, or worse things I can’t even start to imagine. Can they do that? Yes they can! There’s a lot of different methods (I’ll talk about them in more depth in later posts) like phishing, clickjacking, denial of service, etc..
So now you’ve seen the light! You put that extra sign and another number to your passwords, have double verification and encrypt all your data, now you’re safe… Well… Not exactly. Have you ever wondered who else has your information? Hospitals, banks, the government, schools, companies, and many others. Do they have all your information correctly secured? If your answer was maybe, you better start asking questions.
Here comes an example. In 2013 Target store was the victim of a cyber security breach. The hackers stole personal information from customers by accessing the network through the ventilation system. Yes, through the AC.
The fear doesn’t stop there, now let’s talk about national security. Nowadays many public systems are connected to a network. Water and electric supply to a city, traffic lights, bridges control system are just some examples of them. The rumors are that the next World War has already started and it’s being fought with computers. Now here comes another creepy example.
Let’s go back in time to the 80’s, a decade of economic growth, great technological advances and most importantly Madonna. A time where ARPANET (the thing that will eventually become the internet) was starting to expand more and more and where the first worm (a program that replicates itself and spreads to other computers), called the Morris Worm, almost achieved to take it down making more than 6,000 out of 60,000 computers unusable. Now imagine if one of those attacks could take down the entire internet with nobody being able to stop it. Goosebumps right?
I know that by now you might be closing the curtains, sealing the door and windows, and hiding under the bed far away from any device that emits electricity. Reality is that you can hide but you can never escape. Electronic devices are now more than ever part of hour daily life, with the Internet of Things knocking on our doors it is imperative to stress the importance of computer security if we want to protect our privacy. So take it from me when I tell you that “It’s OK to be a little paranoid”.
Turn your thoughts into code 