Digital vigilantes with a moral code
As a self-respecting citizen of the digital world, you doubtless pay plenty of attention to security.
You will have chosen a fiendishly clever password for your email. You are diligent in logging out of financial websites after you have dealt with your affairs. You have probably even upgraded the privacy settings on your Facebook profile, to keep every Tom and Dick and Harry from prying.
That's quaint. But against you is ranged a much more sophisticated army. Legions of tenacious computer savants are trying, at every passing minute, to fight their way to your personal data, through tunnels carved out of code. Through the websites you trust. Through the devices you use, so many more of them these days connected to the internet and therefore – potentially – to them, the hackers.
The worst security breaches just get bigger and scarier. Thousands of people's credit card details held by the retailer TK Maxx: hacked. Even the mighty Google, storing Gmail accounts used by human rights activists in China: hacked.
And there is also an increasing stream of low-level hacks, exposing numerous dangerous holes in even the most apparently trustworthy software and devices, from Citigroup's mobile banking app for the iPhone to the iPhone operating system itself. These sound like bad news.
But here is a curiosity. Most of the time, these holes become public not because a company fesses up after some important data has been stolen, but because the hacker reveals the hole without stealing anything. So you are under attack – but don't worry. Most hackers are trying to do you a favour.
The war for our data rages beyond our ken (or certainly beyond mine). I couldn't tell you what an "exit node" is, let alone put a "sniffer" on one. But there is a good place to start: Las Vegas. For 18 years, hackers have been congregating in the city around this time of the summer for an event called DefCon. First they came in their hundreds, fearing arrest; now they come in their thousands, to marvel at the professors of their dark arts. The latest was at the start of this month. Digital cameras were hacked. Two dozen phones from the crowd were lured to connect to a completely bogus phone network constructed out of $1,500-worth of ham radio equipment. A cash machine was installed with software so that it would spew money to anyone with the code. The face that DefCon presents to the uninitiated could not be more intimidating. Bring a "clean" computer, it urges, or else assume that you are going to be sharing the contents of your hard drive with thousands of strangers. As for journalists who might show up: "If you are a major network and plan on doing a two-minute piece showing all the people with blue hair, you probably shouldn't bother."
Most terrifying of all, a computer programmer friend gleefully pointed me to a YouTube video showing an undercover NBC reporter, with a camera hidden in her handbag, being drummed out of the event three years ago. But with a clean laptop in my carry case, and my heart in my throat, it was off to DefCon 18.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Leave a Reply