Safeguarding Information Security and Technology
Undoubtedly, Information technology has become more and more important. It is now a part of the daily operations of businesses, companies, authorities and non-government organizations. Daily living of an average person entails computer and technology: communication, e-commerce, online banking transactions and other financial and work-related activities.
Businesses, entrepreneurs and small and medium businesses are becoming more reliant on information systems to support and deliver diverse and complex business processes including accounting, inventory, marketing, payroll, research, sales tracking and even distant business operations which involve real-time surveillance.
There have been fair, satisfactory and even outstanding results brought by information technology. The general public has been clinging to what one may consider as the ideal answer to an ever-increasing need of complicated processes of problem solving that produces rapid and reliant outcomes. Indeed. But the jubilation isn't absolute.
As information technology is becoming notable because of its importance, so does the danger that accompanies it. Regardless of the improvement of information technology, security and privacy have become a growing pain in the ass. While superior information technology system was built by the specialists, keeping its security has become more challenging for administrators and end-users.
Today's users have come to be increasingly wider- ranging from vast majority of workers in many companies and associations and a enormous fraction of families all of which are vulnerable to security and privacy threats. Vast majority of the security attributes are a hassle and awkward to use and can pose a great barrier to utilize in getting work done in this desirable pace.
Because of this, internet security measures are bypassed, ignored or disabled too often. Subsequently, when security gets in the way of operation, end-users tend to disable the most security features that protect them from cyber threats. The result is they often engage in activities, consciously or unconsciously, that expose them to these cyber threats while compromising system security and exposing confidential and sensitive or personal information.
Privacy tools and applications have become increasingly tricky to use. Over the course of time, as cyber threats have become increasingly huge and complicated in operation, the core of the tools which are designed to guard end-users have gotten user-unfriendly, difficult to comprehend by an ordinary user and somewhat expensive to avail.
These factors have contributed greatly from the end-users decision of dismissing protection tools that puts them at risk to cyber threats. Computer technology has to be geared towards protecting its users. Privacy and security applications developers must think of a security model and features that don't interfere with system usability. They need to produce tools that are cost-effective and efficient. Web designers and programmers for banking and e-commerce must triple their regular in creating these sites secure and infallible of risks.
Social Engineering, Monsters, Hackers and the Culture and Politics of Technology, Secrets, and Fear
With their beginnings in the 1950s to the present, our collective conception of the hacker has gone from hero to antihero; from political prankster to rebellious adolescent, to offender master-mind out to undermine the social fabric. Embedded inside the archetype of the trickster figure will also be our subconscious fears and ambiguous connections to technology.
Due to the direct connection with technology, hacking and hacker culture is particularly descriptive of our relationship to fear of technology, and its power and control. That is so because technology isn't just about the physicality of machines; it's also about our relationship to them. If we examine the language of computers , it's apparent that the notion of connection was built in from the start.
In one instance, powerful mainframe and UNIX systems that came before the PC are called hosts. After a network connection handshake, if enabled, a new user can login as a guest. This connection also rides on the assumptions that technology is basically hostile and that handling technology requires knowledge and management.
When we talk of computers as user-friendly there's the implicit assumption that this is the exception-that there's been some type of modification to modify the essential wild nature of the beast. We've got windows, magician applications, and software that protect us from the inherent complexity of the binary code of ones and zeros.
These manageable layers which distance the user from the perplexing innards of the machine protect us from the workings which may come loose. It's this confusion and lack of knowledge that the hacker, through social engineering can undermine, and can get control of technology. As a person who has the experience, the programming guru has not just engineered the technology, but is the only one most able to alter, and thus hack.
Added to the mix of our relationship to technology, we've gone from a culture of publicly sharing ideas and research, to a culture of incommoding information for profit. To have the ability to sell information requires protecting it as one does a secret-behind safely locked doors.
The first generation of hackers had been thought of as computer geniuses who went on to form start-up businesses and then huge corporations like Apple and Microsoft. They were also the exact same generation who founded the open minded movement. However, the next generation hackers, their kids, grew up with PCs in their homes and schools.
If we believe our government and corporations as Senex (old man) associations, the first production hackers represent the status quo, the old guard that the Puer aeternus (eternal boy) second generation rebelled against. This boy civilization used mastery over technology to define their liberty and to face adult authority. Not surprisingly then, each generation sets up the cycle to the next.
