The Hackers Strike As I was listening to the radio today while doing something else, an announcement caught my attention. It has to do with power generation and other things. It seems, according to the radio broadcast, a group of Russian hackers, if that part is true, have not only hacked government sites and company sites but they have demanded a ransom from the government. Our government has a policy of never paying a ransom, but will the administration stick to it, or will it secretly pay? I have been hearing rumors some companies are thinking about paying. I personally could never understand that. Any company worth its salt should not only protect their sites in a way the best technology of the day allows and they should also have a backup of everything they don’t keep on the internet so they can reinstall everything. I also heard them say on the radio they were not so sure the government wouldn’t pay in secret. I am very disappointed in the way the government has protected some of their sites. The proof is how easy it was for Gary Mckinnon to get on to government sites. He even admitted he was surprised at how easy it was and claimed at the time he was really hacking nothing to do it. This really ticked off the government and they spent years trying to get him deported from Great Britian and failed. Did you ever wonder who was the very first hacker, you know there had to be one. John Draper gets the credit. He was known as Captain Crunch. He got that name because he used a whistle from a box of cereal to do his first hack. Not everyone agrees with giving him the credit some say we have to look for major hackers and give credit to Robert Morris who invented the Morris Worm in 1988. The Worm was released on the internet. Back to John Draper. He realized he could use a whistle to imitate the tones made when coins were dropped into the phone for a call. He became very interested in phone networks. Hacking has been going on for decades, but people were breaking codes and secret messages for thousands of years before that, so it seemed only natural when computers came on the scene, some people would try and hack the software. Yes there are the criminals who hack for profit or do so at their government’s bidding, but there are also those who think it is a challenge or want to find out things they think is being withheld from the public. The first known ransomware attack is credited to the Aids Trojan. It happened in 1989. An Aids researcher had his research disk infected with a computer ransomware virus. Any other people who inserted the disk into their computer, had all the data on the computer encrypted and a message appeared demanding a ransom to have it decrypted. For the next 34 years to today it has just gotten worse. The entire world has been put at risk. It is amazing at how many people who deal with important computer material just are too lazy to back things up at the end of the day. One of the biggest hacks ever and one that really, excuse my language, screwed all of us was the Equifax breach. In 2017 some hackers found it was relatively easy to hack that credit bureau. I have always said no other companies should have access to our personal information without our permission and even if they are allowed to, which I think is wrong, there must be certain standards for the protection used. In some cases very weak protection was used by companies which had our data. There are about 330 million Americans and it is said Equifax lost the data for 143 million of them. They lost all sorts of things like social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver’s license numbers and more. No wonder so many people are having their identities stolen. Sometimes data becomes available when it shouldn’t due to human error and that is just what happened to one large financial company. Something went wrong with their code because someone made a mistake and all 885 million files on people became available and were also able to be changed. So, we have human error and hackers to worry about. We also have, as I said, weak protection in many areas on the internet. One famous hotel chain got hacked in 2018. What they lost just boggles the mind. They lost the records of guest visits. These records were rather detailed and had passport information, credit card info and many more items which should have been secret. It was said to be one of the largest hacks in history at the time. Social media is also a favorite of hackers. I can’t tell you how many times people on Facebook have been hacked. It happens so much it has become easy to spot. One of the ways you can spot it is when you get a friend request from someone you are already friends with. Another way is by people telling you not to answer their posts because they are not from them even though they look like they are. Twitter was hit last year and it is said hackers stole 5.4 million files from the site. One of the main reasons some hackers like to hit these types of sites is they have famous people on them and they might want to steal their identity if possible, or even get enough info somehow to raid their bank account or rob their credit card. They say the oldest crime is prostitution, but the oldest computer crime is hacking. There are certain companies which look very appetizing to hackers. I am talking about financial companies, banks, and such, but there are also others such as those which would have a lot of personal information on them because this can be used for all sorts of nefarious endeavors. I am sure most of you have heard about title theft. Criminals can steal your home right out from under you and you may not know it until you are evicted. I heard a story about a woman who was coming home and when she got there, bulldozers were knocking down the building. A criminal had sold it to a buyer who didn’t know it was stolen and had already destroyed most of it when the woman arrived. Just imagine how she must have felt. Hacking will never stop and now has become weaponized by every country. They are all doing it to each other. Almost everyone in a western country has been a victim, even though they may not know it.
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