If you open your door for your guests to get in, you open the door for unwanted intruders too, and if you shut the door so that the intruders cannot get in, your guests are locked out. Internet is a like a door to your computer for external data to come in, you want information from internet but not unwanted stuff. Do you think you always have control over what is being accessed from your computer? Or what is getting in it? Do you want a bunch of salespersons shouting in your room, or somebody sneaking in your drawer and taking your blank checkbook and Credit card? The popups and ads are like salespersons shouting in your room and some programs can really take away your checkbook or credit card. The physical presence of the salesperson and the thief might sound more dangerous, but the later can do more damage than the first one. Physical salespersons and thieves might leave evidence but the internet theft might be without evidence. Also they can be so clever that you might have unknowingly agreed to be left looted.
Today data and information is not a stack of papers locked in a shelf but are bits written in hard drives of computer. Today keys aren’t made up of copper but made up of words in your head which is supposed to be known just by you. It is supposed to be more durable and safe. But if somebody has access to the data, it can be modified duplicated and distributed very easily, without the owner knowing about it. If something is physically stolen, at least you know about it, but with today’s technology you don’t know you are being robbed until you have nothing left. Even if we have a subtle hint about what is going on, we don’t go after it because it doesn’t look like a big threat in the beginning.
The crime can be done without leaving evidence and can cause billions of loss. The loss can be more than monetary if it comes to national security. The hardest part to track this kind of crime is to find out who is involved. Because all one can see in the crime scene is data sent by the criminal, and if the criminal gets a subtle hint that he is being tracked, he might fled away and never be tracked again. But the criminal can enter from another route and another form which takes as much effort to find out and investigate.
The book “The Cuckoo’s Egg” talks about the complexity of finding an information hacker and the patience involved in it. The author talks about his careful investigation, non cooperation from other security entities in the country at first, as they didn’t know the gravity of the issue. The author was to investigate the discrepancy of $.75 in accounting results which led to the revelation of a hacker who was getting national security information through the author’s lab. Though the author knew it could be a great problem and worked hard to track down the hacker his appeals were ignored at first thinking it wasn’t a big threat to be tracked down.
So, the point I want to make in this blog is that, though intrusion through wire may not sound as scary as intrusion through your door, its result can be surprisingly shocking. New ways are being discovered to secure your computer from intrusions, but for some reasons, the criminals in these sectors are relatively smart to find a loophole in the security and intrude into your system. The future can be worse as our life is more depending upon digits.
