Hackers: The Good, The Bad and The Money
The term Hacker was made popular by Steven Levy in his book “Hackers: Heroes Of The Computer The Revolution” published in 1984 was about those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early ’80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction.
In the past decade there have been hundreds of data breaches resulting in millions of compromised records. The motivation behind these hacks? Identity Theft. Meanwhile dozens of new laws and government intervention to protect citizen data have emerged.
Black Hat (bad), White Hat (good) or Grey Hat (good by day bad by night), over the past decade the media has given the term “hacker” a negative connotation. Or is it hackers that gave the term a negative connotation?
Either way, whenever I’m talking bad guy hacker I’m careful to precede the word hacker with “criminal” so I don’t piss off anyone who considers themselves a good guy hacker.
Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Graham Bell were all hackers. Good ones too.
Today we are faced with a real issue of hackers attacking our financial systems, critical infrastructure and even our own PC’s. And now as we use our mobile phones for commerce hackers are going after them too.
John Haney, Sales Executive at iovation stated “With more people than ever conducting banking activities from mobile devices, being able to proactively detect risk and suspicious activity in real-time is essential to protecting financial institutions and their customers. Although mobile banking is a powerful tool, it can also be used as a weapon for cybercrime and we want financial institutions to be prepared to fight mobile fraud. This is especially poignant given the FFIEC guidelines that established expectations for companies to adopt a layered approach to prevent cyber-attacks.”
Through its ReputationManager 360 service, iovation tracks the reputations of everything from desktops to laptops, mobile phones to tablets, and gaming consoles to smart TVs. By utilizing iovation’s device reputation intelligence.
Meanwhile, as a consumer, you are directly responsible for the security of your own network and devices.
Install and update antivirus, antispyware, antiphishing and a firewall on your devices.
Update your operating systems critical security patches.
Encrypt your home/office WiFi connection
Beware of phishing, vishing and internet scams.
Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation. He is the author of 99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Your Mobile was Hacked! See him knock’em dead in this identity theft prevention video. Disclosures.
