Dear Lifehacker, It seems that every day I am waking up to more articles in my news feed about another big company being hacked, with the hackers bringing down services or stealing sensitive information. Why is this happening? Are we currently in the midst of some ‘hacker revolution’ where every man and his dog have decided they want to join ‘anonymous’ or whoever else to fight ‘the man’? Or is a small group of people finding a lot of big holes within the infrastructure of major organisations? Have big companies thought they could get away with providing minimal security on our data all the years, and now it is starting to all fall back on them? I just don’t understand the constant stream of ‘this was hacked’ and ‘this was stolen’. Any insights as to what is currently going on in the digital world? Thanks, Concerned and Confused.
Dear C+C (everybody dance now!),
I can’t necessarily offer any deep insights, but I can share a few observations about why reports of security incidents have become more common in recent times.
There are a lot of potential targets. Online activity is utterly mainstream. The majority of the population surfs the web; most of us shop online. As a result, a massive amount of personal information are stored by companies. Even if 99 per cent of those are well-secured, the other 1 per cent still provides potentially rich pickings, for both professional criminals and activists who want to highlight security problems.
There is no such thing as perfect security. Modern software is complex, and complexity inevitably leads to security holes. Even with the best-developed security system, exploits are going to emerge. That doesn’t mean businesses shouldn’t even try; it does mean that problems are going to arise regardless.
Anonymous have been very busy. The loose online collective known as Anonymous has been involved in many high-profile incidents recently. Unlike professional criminal hackers, its motivations are often political. Its willingness to offer statements explaining the reasoning behind its actions also means it gets plenty of media coverage.
Once media hit a vein of popular stories, they keep mining it. Arguably the most prominent hacking incident of recent times was Sony’s loss of PlayStation Network customer data last year. That issue got widely covered in the general press, not just the technology media, and created an awareness that stories about hacking could be popular. As I noted in my discussion of how the media covers open source, once a topic becomes “fashionable”, coverage often increases for a lengthy period of time.
In practical terms, you shouldn’t panic because of this apparent glut — but you should make sure that you have a sensible approach to security when you are online. Use security software (we have recommendations for ), make sure you have different, difficult-to-guess passwords for web services, and change them regularly. You can’t protect yourself against everything, but a little caution goes a long way.
If readers have other theories as to what’s caused this upsurge in security hacking (and reporting of it), we’d love to hear them in the comments.
Cheers
Lifehacker
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