A New Age: Year Of The Hackers
If you haven’t noticed, hacking has been in the news heavily for the past few years. 2014 was massive, and 2015 looks like a new cyberwar is being waged. Computer warfare will be the new front in which countries wage war against each other. It’s not so much important to end someone’s life in battle anymore, no, it’s even worse to hack their information and expose their secrets. You can ask someone one question about being hacked and you’ll usually hear someone say, “Ugh, I hope no one sees my browser history. That would be awful.”
If you use Reddit, your search history is doomed. Mine is probably doomed. I recall watching a special during the Olympics in Sochi, Russia about how you’re instantly hacked the moment you enter the country. The special then went on to show about what you search for is monitored by the Government for certain things. The special interviewed a writer from Criminal Minds and he was placed on a watch list for what he searched for. If you’re a writer and don’t know much about…say, killing and taking a person apart in a surgical way. How are you going to write an episode without looking for that on the internet (Unless you’re a surgeon)?
The writer searched for these weird things that got him put on the watchlist. I have had multiple story ideas for books and short stories, but didn’t have the information I wanted because I didn’t want to search for things over the internet. I’m terrified to talk about certain things on the phone even if it’s completely innocent.
This is a new battlefield: Hackers for hire willing to expose things you don’t want known about you for a price or for their country. Let’s look at some of the recent hackings that have been so heavily covered in the news:
- Malware attacks on Yahoo! (2014)
- JPMorgan Chase Hacking Affects 76 Million Households (2014)
- The Celebrity Phone Hack (The Fappening, 2014)
- The Sony Pictures Hack that led to The Interview getting shelved, then released on VOD (2014)
- Syrian Electronic Army Hacks Skype’s Platforms (2014)
- Community Health Systems Hospital network hacked, 4.5 million records stolen (2014)
- Snapchat Hacked in Dec 2013-Jan 2014
- TAO Division of NSA Hacks Computers Globally (2013)
- Target Hacking hit up to 110 million customers (2014)
- London Twitter Users Spammed During Christmas (2013)
- Target Credit Cards and Customer Info Hacked (2013)
- Nearly 2 Million Online Accounts Hacked in November, 2013
- Adobe Hacking – 38 Million Accounts Affected (2013)
- The SpamHaus Attacks (Geneva, London, Europe)(2013)
- Fake Tweet on ‘Obama, Explosions’ Causes Market Crash
- Burger King Hacking (US) (2013)
- Saudi Arabia Hackers Breach 400,000 Israeli Credit Cards (2012)
- Sony Pictures and Playstation 3.0 Hacking (2011)
- Stuxnet Botnet Attack (2010)
These are just the major hacks in the past few years, I couldn’t possibly compile each persons doxing. What’s doxing? Let’s let Wikipedia give you the overview:
Doxing (from dox, abbreviation of documents), or doxxing, is the Internet-based practice of researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual. The methods employed in pursuit of this information include searching publicly available databases and social media websites (like Facebook), hacking, and social engineering. It is closely related to cyber-vigilantism, hacktivism and cyber-bullying.
You can go on the dark web and pay under $100 for a hacker to infiltrate anyone you know. You can get information to destroy someone for the 1/4 the price of an Xbox One.
Hollywood has tried to show hacking on the big screen, but they never get it right. Actually, they never get computers right, either. In the most recent hacking film, Blackhat (A term for someone violating computer or Internet security maliciously or for illegal personal gain), A furloughed convict and his American and Chinese partners hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta. The hacker is then seen shooting guns and doing insane action hero stuff. No. There’s a reason the movie flopped in its opening weekend, and that reason is that it’s just a terrible movie.
In Live Free or Die Hard you’ll see hackers infiltrating a load of things like traffic signals or redirecting gas lines to cause explosions. Nope. You can’t redirect gas lines like that, but in film hacking, you can!
In the 1995 film Hackers, a boy is arrested by the U.S. Secret Service for writing a computer virus and is banned from using a computer until his 18th birthday. Years later, he and his new-found friends discover a plot to unleash a dangerous computer virus, but they must use their computer skills to find the evidence while being pursued by the Secret Service and the evil computer genius behind the virus.
How do they portray hacking in Hackers?
This is the result of people not really knowing much about computers. If you have ever seen any television show or movie where it just shows the hacker typing and not even using their mouse, it’s pretty much BS.
Can you become a hacker and not really know much at the beginning? Of course. Laziness extends to even hackers. When I was younger during the AOL days, I knew a lot of hackers and got really involved with all the things going on with the early internet. What most of them used were termed “progies.” They’re hacking software written by others and used by the unskilled hacker to infiltrate computers and websites. These people aren’t really hackers, but are called “Skid” or “Script Kiddies.” This means these are people who lack the ability to write sophisticated programming programs or exploits on their own. I guess, if you look at the programs used in the above video from Hackers, you can see an example of them using progies to infiltrate.
Here is an example of an early progie called WinNuke:
Without getting technical, you find your targets IP address (An Internet Protocol address numerical label assigned to each device, basically the address of your device), fill it in, give your message, and hit “Nuke ME 95.” What does this do? It sends a bunch of data that can’t be read, locks up the PC, and the user gets greeted with the message before getting the “Blue Screen of Death.”
Now, hackers are extremely sophisticated. Whenever you see news of something like, “American Gov’t Caught Spying On German Chancellors Phone” it’s not something that isn’t already known about. All countries are hacking each other to find out information about each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re an ally or not. The more information you have in the Information Age means you have the most power. Don’t be surprised to see headline stories of cyberwarfare throughout 2015.
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.