This is simple. We are under assault. Privacy and security rapidly are becoming footnotes of history, quaint notions of days gone by. Every week we read of security breaches; attacks and hacks into government facilities, bank data bases, corporate enterprise operations, and even popular online sites that cater to hundreds of millions of users.
It’s nothing personal. Few of these robotic-like attacks are after your personal email, or your personal purchases, but they’re after something or anything of value and such breaches are occurring with increased frequency; and these are merely the ones we hear or read about.
Online giant Yahoo! had a security breach that compromised half a billion accounts. Dating sites get hacked with regularity (ostensibly, such account information could be used to blackmail registered users who don’t want spouses to know they, uh, um, registered).
None other than Donald Trump recognizes the same problem.
Identify theft, financial laundering, as well as ransomware — involving the extortion of a hacked institution — are all becoming increasingly common
Duh. The real issue isn’t that we’re being tracked and hacked, but what can be done to prevent it or mitigate such attacks.
We should not let this be like the history of the Mafia, which was allowed to grow into a nationwide organization, which infiltrated and corrupted so many areas of society. We can learn from this history, that when the Department of Justice, the FBI, the DEA, and state and local police and prosecutors were combined in task forces directed at the Mafia, they were able to get great successes and prosecutions out of them, and seizing their business interests
Sure. That worked so well.
Maybe what’s really needed are public executions of those who are caught hacking into government or corporate computer systems. Or, for those who are hacking into the U.S. from abroad, prime time television videos of drones blowing up the suspected hacker hideouts. Those videos would go viral and just might be fodder to become a highly visible deterrent. Or, a reality TV show.
What? Too harsh?
This privacy and security problem is two-fold.
First, we give away personal information to online sites like Google, Bing, Amazon, and many others who gather, store, slice, dice, and Julienne the data that then becomes a profile of information that can be used against us; initially to pepper us with targeted advertising, but which could also be used as a ransom against public exposure.
Those who visit Google, use Android smartphones, even run Windows on their PCs are most at risk.
What about Apple’s customers?
Second, many people just use the wrong devices and frequent the wrong websites. Macs have long been more secure to average users than Windows, and more than 98-percent of all malware is done on Android devices, not on iPhones or iPads. Apple is the second to last refuge for privacy and security.
What’s last?
Get off the grid.