Hacked Off
Hacking and being hacked once was an embarrassment, a red-faced moment. Now it is part of life. For example your humble editors have been part of an ongoing denial of service attack on his cell phone voice mail from an idiot in Toronto Canada. Very little holds me back from publishing his name and address. And that is the point.
It is not just being hacked; it is vicious negative SEO attacks on the web, posting to boards inaccurate information or creating fictitious Wikipedia pages. Because the web is the wild west and some pedantic little minds think it is funny that they can piss on your leg and get away with it… well frankly people are getting hacked off.
The security industry has a failure in their look at hackers. Computer security is by design defensive and with no plans for offensive security options. In physical security you can have a trespasser or thief arrested – what to you do with a hacker? (Ooooooh do I have some ideas!!!!)
Well-financed counter hackers are now being hired to hack the hackers. Counter hackers are drilling down to get rid of the problem
In one case, the counter hacker found the hacker and found the hacker to be a local man. The executive instructed the counter hacker to erase everything he could find linked to the hacker. The executive than showed up on the hacker’s door and told the hacker if he did it again he would erase his house. The hacker called the police and complained – the state chose not to do anything.
On a more reasonable level many of the larger companies are hiring counter penetration teams to “knock” on the doors of the hackers. They are not going as far as the example above – but they are letting the hackers know that they are vulnerable.
It is time for the executives of larger companies understand that they need to keep the IPCI off the networked computers. It is time for the hackers to understand that they are not funny and they are a target, electronic and maybe even physical.
The legal remedies have not kept up with the damage being done and are too expensive to access for most of all of the small business owners.
Interesting times we live in.
