For people with computers, which is most of us, 2015 wasn’t great. But next year is probably going to be much, much worse.
The catastrophic data breach of the extramarital dating site Ashley Madison is currently an outlier in the history of hacking: for perhaps the first time, the information that was leaked was extremely personal, and damaging in its own right.
As we entrust ever more personal data to the cloud, breaches of this sort are inevitably going to increase. Connected home CCTV, direct message histories, chat transcripts or photo messages could all be devastating on a personal level if leaked.
The networks that control power plants, national grids and reservoirs rely heavily on obscurity to defend against attack: they aren’t directly connected to the internet, and use arcane coding. But that obscurity cannot be a long-term defence.
No hacker in history has ever been as successful at disrupting power to American homes as the squirrel that scampered into a substation in California and caused a power cut for 45,000 people.
For people with computers, which is most of us, 2015 wasn’t great. But next year is probably going to be much, much worse.
The catastrophic data breach of the extramarital dating site Ashley Madison is currently an outlier in the history of hacking: for perhaps the first time, the information that was leaked was extremely personal, and damaging in its own right. You can’t change your passwords, or warn your bank, to stop a marriage being wrecked by the fact that you were trying to have an affair.
But as we entrust ever more personal data to the cloud, breaches of this sort are inevitably going to increase. Connected home CCTV, direct message histories, chat transcripts or photo messages could all be devastating on a personal level if leaked.
So what good news, then, that the British government intends to force internet service providers to retain communications data for a full year. Because the experience of TalkTalk, which was allegedly hacked by a group of teenagers applying the 20-year-old technique of SQL injections, surely shows that there is no risk at all in doing so.
But not every hack is pranksters or criminal enterprise. The coming year will also be the year that cyberterrorism comes of age – sort of.
Experts have been warning about the lack of security around industrial control systems for years. The networks that control power plants, national grids and reservoirs rely heavily on obscurity to defend against attack: they aren’t directly connected to the internet, and use arcane coding. But that obscurity cannot be a long-term defence.
In the end, though, we perhaps have more to fear from sheer bad luck than we do from dedicated attack. As the pseudonymous security researcher the Grugq points out, no hacker in history has ever been as successful at disrupting power to American homes as the squirrel that scampered into a substation in California and caused a power cut for 45,000 people.
The digital world
by Alex Hern
The Guardian
What will happen in 2016?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/31/what-will-happen-in-2016-predictions
For people with computers, which is most of us, 2015 wasn’t great. But next year is probably going to be much, much worse.
The catastrophic data breach of the extramarital dating site Ashley Madison is currently an outlier in the history of hacking: for perhaps the first time, the information that was leaked was extremely personal, and damaging in its own right. You can’t change your passwords, or warn your bank, to stop a marriage being wrecked by the fact that you were trying to have an affair.
But as we entrust ever more personal data to the cloud, breaches of this sort are inevitably going to increase. Connected home CCTV, direct message histories, chat transcripts or photo messages could all be devastating on a personal level if leaked.
So what good news, then, that the British government intends to force internet service providers to retain communications data for a full year. Because the experience of TalkTalk, which was allegedly hacked by a group of teenagers applying the 20-year-old technique of SQL injections, surely shows that there is no risk at all in doing so.
But not every hack is pranksters or criminal enterprise. The coming year will also be the year that cyberterrorism comes of age – sort of.
Experts have been warning about the lack of security around industrial control systems for years. The networks that control power plants, national grids and reservoirs rely heavily on obscurity to defend against attack: they aren’t directly connected to the internet, and use arcane coding. But that obscurity cannot be a long-term defence.
In the end, though, we perhaps have more to fear from sheer bad luck than we do from dedicated attack. As the pseudonymous security researcher the Grugq points out, no hacker in history has ever been as successful at disrupting power to American homes as the squirrel that scampered into a substation in California and caused a power cut for 45,000 people.