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Is This the Golden Age of Hacking?
Barence writes "With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers."
Haven't RTFA'd yet, but I would suspect that hacks aren't any more common now - just more visible and more reported. It's like when the news media has a "summer of the shark" - after a few notable incidents, the media realizes that these stories bring in viewers, and then any further incidents, no matter how insignificant, are publicized when they otherwise wouldn't be. Just look at the recent Bethesda hack - that kind of thing goes on all the time, and I was surprised anyone bothered paying attention to it. Sure, some of them were big - the first Sony attack was significant, and the US Senate hack is noteworthy - but a lot of these recent hacks have been relatively minor.
There's also the possibility that all this attention is actually causing more hacks - after the initial Sony hack, hackers realized that Sony was a big, vulnerable target. By extension, they realized that big companies actually aren't bulletproof - in fact, many of them have terrible security. I'm sure such knowledge was widespread in the black-hat world, but now the secret is public knowledge.
What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers.
But by that logic, we could have seen similar things when the dotcom bubble burst, right?
My view of this comes from a completely different place. I see an exceptionally large amount of users' rights being debated and discussed and we're seeing communities popping up devoted to this. Frankly, it seems like the users are just getting shit on. And, like any struggle for rights, there are negative things that happen. There are always going to be people that take it to an extreme level and there are going to be innocent bystanders turned into victims. While I still see this as a bad thing, some of these actions remind me of a sort of John Brown at Harpers Ferry incident. Similarly, there's the mindless looting during rights demonstrations and protest crowds at the G8 summit but it's not the overall message that's doing that. The opportunists come out of the woodwork.
Similarly the public and citizens of the internet are demanding more rights. While this fight is going on with Facebook, Sony, world governments, etc, the communities are going to pop up that take it to an extreme offensive. They will do bad things and I'm not going to be one condoning it but I see it as part of the growing pains of companies respecting peoples' rights.
It's a sort of vigilante justice that I don't agree with nor condone but I can somewhat sympathize when I feel like I've been unjustly wronged by some of the targets and have had no sense of justice in the matter. People who feel strongly about this and have that negative spark in them would have a motive to become a part of these new communities. And in my opinion that's a more plausible explanation as to why you're seeing an explosion -- not the recession or turnover in network employees.
My work here is dung.