Today was the second time this school year that my son, who is in college, had his computer attacked by a virus, rendering it almost useless. The first time was move in day in August. He had just done a Microsoft Update and it blew his system. It turned out there was a problem with the Microsoft update. This was not what we needed on move in day. It cost my tech savvy husband 2 hours of his time to fix it and get the computer up and running on the college network.
Today, after allowing a virus protection update from Bit Defender he had a similar system failure. He called and my husband talked him through restoring his system. This time it cost them each about 1 hour and a half in time lost. And there were thousands of online posts about the Bit Defender issue within a short time of the problem occurring.
I am constantly amazed by the cyber world we live in. There are people out that there spend their days hacking and creating viruses for the sole purpose of ruining someone else’s day. WHY? What kind of person is drawn to doing this for a hobby? There are several levels of computer hacking/spying and at each level the reasons people have for doing it are different.
The lowest level of computer mischief would include kids or young adults hacking into other systems, or other people’s Facebook pages, emails, text messages, just to say that they did it or to “mess with someone.” This is a status thing. It is something they can brag about. They can put a nasty photo on someone else’s Facebook page. They can brag about it to their friends and feel important. One could argue some of this is a form of bullying and I agree. It usually is limited in scope however.
The next level is more of a criminal situation. It is the person who wants to wreak as much havoc as they can…..cyber wilding, if you will. They get a kick out of it and don’t worry about who is hurt in the process. They hack for the sake of hacking. They may not target any one person in particular. These people are more than annoying, they are vandals and need to be dealt with under the criminal justice system.
The top tier of hackers is the most worrisome by far. They are the hackers that don’t want any attention. They want to spy and sneak in stealth mode. They want to hack into the Pentagon, the White House, The FBI, CIA, Power Grid, Banking System, Wall Street, or Transportation System and hold our country hostage, or worse, destroy it. These are terrorists, not just criminals. A lot of them are state sponsored by countries we have philosophical difference with such as North Korea, Iran, and possibly Russia and China. These spies have the destruction of our way of life in mind when they work their dastardly magic on a keyboard. It is impossible to know how many of these people are out there. Our laws have not kept up with the internet age and these people know how to get around our firewalls, our encryption and our anti-virus software.
In the last 5-10 years, we have had suspicious multi state power outages, major banks and insurance companies have had their customer’s personal account information stolen through hacking, countless US Government agency computers have been hacked into.
Since almost every aspect of our modern life is controlled by computers, we are extremely vulnerable in many critical areas. Think of these things controlled by computers and how things could change if someone was able to successfully hack into these systems:
Air traffic control and /or airports
Water treatment facilities and delivery systems.
Rail Lines
Traffic Lights in a major city
Hospitals
Colleges
Electrical Grid
Natural Gas distribution
Large Production facilities
Worldwide Satellite signals
Telephone systems (Verizon, AT & T, etc)
Cable TV companies
Any Governmental (State or Federal) agency
The Post office, FedEx, UPS
When you think about how we have come to depend on all of these systems it is almost impossible to imagine would happen if they suddenly started malfunctioning or stopped working altogether.
Computer spying and hacking may be the next battle in the war on terrorism. I hope we are armed and ready. Call me old fashioned but some of these scenarios make me long for the days of plug in typewriters, corded telephones, and paper records stored in filing cabinets. Viva 1980!!
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