There have been a lot of hacker attacks in the news lately, it seems like it's happening more and more frequently now due to an increase in the number of hackers and interest in these services from advertiser and marketing people around the world. We do after all live in the age of information and information is money. Sony was one of the bigger attacks recently, causing PSN to shut down for a while and costing the company a huge stain in their image as well as millions in law suits. Now I hear Honda Canada has just been attacked as well, and I'm not even mentioning Air Miles and all the other North American databases that have had their networks breached for customer data. So what can companies and customers do to prevent being victims of these crimes?
I have been hearing about the end of human biological evolution for a while now. It is believed that biological evolution is too slow to compete with the technological evolution that humans have been experiencing for the past centuries. The mechanics of this evolution in this age of information is way too complex and fast for nations to overlook and control. Networks are faster and more integrated then ever and the trend is not changing anytime soon, and just like copyright issues we've been seeing for a while, privacy is going to continue to be a major area of discussion in the future years. These are issues that will not be countered by governments fast enough and the ignorance of people in these matters will eventually cause one of two things. Governments will enforce much more regulation on networks then necessary just to prevent issues such as these to propagate, or they will attempt to educate people more about vulnerabilities and corporations will eventually see that more attention needs to be paid to hacking and data theft.
I'm not a hacker, but I do find a lot of what hackers do fascinating. For years I've been learning just how vulnerable we really are to people that want to people with knowledge of networks and computers. The best thing to do at this point is to play safe, corporations should not be storing unneeded information and they should invest more in network security. In the end the consumers pay part of the price and companies are damaged as well. More and more technologies like this will be areas heavily explored for crimes and I am still waiting to see a digital act of terrorism. Unfortunately, much like flying nowadays, the Internet may very well be changed for the worst with cyber terrorism, this may be inevitable however.
