Picture this scenario: You have just completed your company’s website. It looks perfect and works beautifully. You upload it to your server and marvel at it’s beauty before you retire for the evening. The next thing you know you’re receiving a call at 3am saying that the site has been taken over by hackers and they’ve stolen the database of users and passwords and posted it for all to see. Needless to say your beautifully constructed website was just undone in a matter of hours for sport.
Hackers 1 – You 0
This is becoming more of a reality as the days pass. Internet security has increased, but so has the tenacity of the hacker culture. Normally it’s done just for sport to see who can crack something first, most notable were the site attacks after The Pirate Bay ruling where different hacker groups were all too proud to claim the attacks were there. In these cases, hacking can gain fame and notoriety with their antics with those against such sites, but they are still committing harmful acts then when used in other contexts can lead to disreputable harm.
Instead of a community that only resides in the physical world, we have spread onto the Internet creating a dual society, but this digital world is far more dangerous than the one we wake to see everyday.
We put our lives on the web. We do our online banking through websites, we send money through the use of payment sites, we sign up for numerous accounts to different sites, and we share copious amounts of information we would never share with our best friend. Hackers don’t care about the creed of the person or how good and humble they may be and from personal experience, they definitely do not care what type of site they attack.
Two years ago I was checking on my local Anime Convention for a friend, when suddenly the site went blank. After refreshing numerous times, the site was back, but had been attacked by radical group spouting off ideologist about racism and how we shall all burn for our love of cartoons. Why on earth would you attack a website devoted to anime? What was the point?
Even though I did not see a point at the time, I definitely do now. If they are practicing with what ordinary people would consider the small fish, what could they accomplish against government agencies that are housed on the web? Imagine in the next few years if we, and we most likely will, see more viruses, worms, and trojans appear. This type of warfare is only to increase with little basis for it to slow down. A physical bomb can take lives and leave destruction, but so can the loss of your identity to hackers.
