The Hacker-Warrior Threat, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #387 | @MDWorld

December 29, 2014 Mike Gold 1 Comment

“There’s a new kind of warfare out there,” our mass media have been telling us these past weeks. They are pointing to the Hacker-Warriors’ attack on Sony Pictures that resulted in the outing of nasty emails, as if you couldn’t find that sort of thing on every corporation’s servers. Oh, yeah, and they intimidated Sony into pulling one of its many sophomoric movies from theatrical release.

Outside of the obvious assault on our dignity, as war crimes go the Sony slam is hardly the attack on Pearl Harbor or the U.S. invasion of Hawaii. But it’s a pre-existing condition. The Home Depot got hacked and the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank had to send out replacement credit cards to millions of customers. Similar hack attacks have occurred at nationwide retailers Target, Staples, T.J. Maxx, and Marshalls, among others, and the list grows every week. The banks and most big retailers presently are making plans to replace the entire system with chip-embedded cards which will require new check-out card readers.

By comparison, this makes Sony’s income loss, formidable as it is, a fart in a blizzard.

We didn’t blame our many international enemies for the credit card attacks, although we loudly discussed that possibility. We did blame North Korea for the Sony stunt and claim to have evidence to support that; North Korea denies this and, in a gesture unique to the authoritarian nation, offered to team-up with U.S. officials to find the real enemy.

Maybe so. For all I know, maybe O.J. Simpson was behind all this. Be that as it may, as we prepare for this week’s iteration of our ever-worsening Brave New World, we must look to those with the potential for causing future computer espionage trauma. These are the real enemies.

For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has given us 81 Nobel laureates, 52 National Medal of Science recipients, 45 Rhodes Scholars, 38 MacArthur Fellows, and two Fields Medalists. They add about 11,000 graduates and undergraduates to their student roster each year, students who, by and large, really understand how to wield a computer.

Of course, MIT is only the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of universities worldwide that foster potential Hacker-Warriors. There are hundreds of high schools that do the same. That kid sitting on the Manhattan subway next to you? He’s going to Stuyvesant High School, well-known for its scientifically mega-brained student body. Similar schools exist… everywhere.

That kid sitting across from you? He or she could be a terrorist, laboring in the basement behind a VPN wall. And that kid just trashed your pension.

So what sort of a threat does this pose to our society? What the hell; I’ll answer this in the form of a joke.

Question: How many Hacker-Warriors does it take to blow up the world?

Answer: Only one.

Pretty funny joke, huh?

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Michael Davis and Martha Thomases as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.