Winter is coming – Are you prepared to save yourself!
We have either heard or read about War that includes World War-1, World War-2, or even United States invasion to Vietnam, Iraq, Or Afghanistan. If you missed the real war like these, you may have seen War in TV in Game of Thrones.
Fortunately, we don’t have a World War-3 yet. However, if I ask you what’s the probability of a World War-3, what do you think? I say no way. Let’s take a deep dive into war to justify the why there is no World War-3 in traditional way.
In recent history, the only successful invasion (let’s not call it a war) was Russia’s conquest of Crimea in twenty first century. However, the Russian elite itself, probably well aware of the real-cost and benefits of military adventures; which is why they have been careful about not escalating it further. Be it Russia or United States, have been using the school bully principle. Pick up on the weakest kid, and don’t beat him up too much, and lest the teacher intervenes.
Why is it so difficult for the major powers to wage successful war in 21st century? Yuval Noah Harari explained it really well in his books “One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. In past, economic assets were mostly material, so it was relatively straight forward to enrich yourself by conquest. If you defeated your enemies in the battle field, you can get cash by looting their cities, selling their civilians in the slave markets, and occupying valuable Wheatfield and gold mines.” Today, only puny profits can be made that way. Today the main economic assets consist technical, institutional knowledge or data, rather than the wheat fields or gold mines.
We keep calling data is gold and technologies are blood, if you think now, the concept of war has to change and it did. You are seeing cyber criminals, cyber-attacks, cyber theft more over war and invasion. Unfortunately, a common man has very little knowledge about this, even big fortune 500 companies are resting after sending few emails on phishing attacks! People read it and it leaves in their memory for a day or two and then vanishes. Some people also ask, why do I care, my job is to do what I get paid for!
This reminds me a small story, we watched, when we were kids. It’s small cartoon in our one and only television channel in ‘Door Darshan’, I still remember cartoon. There were a bunch of birds flying free on the air and their captain taught them a song it says “Bird catchers will come, use the bird catching net, give you grains, but don’t be greedy and get stuck”. The group had been singing this for year after years, even without knowing the meaning, and some day they got caught by the bird catchers, while singing the song and eating the grains spread over the net.
This is so true for our world today, we all know, it will come, sing the song without understand the meaning and then give the bank account number for expecting some free money from Nigeria! I still don’t blame these people, why? Because they have no idea on how hacking is done or how valuable their data is. When I used to receive of these emails, while working for a big company, what I knew, don’t keep a simple password, don’t open an email that looks suspicious and that’s the end of it.
Once, I was badly looted of 50 dollars by cybercrime not fooled by Nigerian email though, but still my act was foolish! It’s not much of a loss in terms of money for most people but if you are in a financial crunch, you know the value of 50 dollars!
I realized, if we want to be safe, I need to know “how to hack”. Now, I look back at the event (when I was fooled) as “I paid 50 dollars for learning”.
- Initially, I thought, cybercrimes or hacking happens at the big companies or governments and not to common people like us but it’s myth!
- The second myth, I learned, when I was studying hacking, I always thought, you need to be a computer nerd, with tremendous tech knowledge to hack someone.
You can learn hacking computers, WIFI networks, break into a secured network in just a month of studying, readings, and analytical mind. It’s like playing chess, many people hack, just to have an adrenalin rush. I had the similar experience, when I hacked my own computer!
We are going to start with you and not the organization as we all look at things, what does this mean for me?
Let’s start with your home WIFI password, a hacker just a need a little misconfiguration to hack your WIFI under 15 minutes, if you leave WPS with PIN on (you made the job much simpler), if don’t, have this misconfiguration, never mind, and a would-be hacker can still hack your network in less than 30 minutes, even if you are using WEP, WPA, or WPA2, or enterprise grade setup unless your passwords has random text, numbers, upper case and lower-case characters. They can still hack it but it will be expensive as they would need to run all the combinations with a GPU. If you don’t have these in your WIFI passwords, they just need a computer with something Kali Linux installed and a separate network card worth 20 USD. If you are thinking, I am oversimplifying, but I am not.
Now, if someone hacks into your WIFI, don’t think they want to just use your internet, they are looking for your data, passwords, credit card number, browser data, anything that you have stored. Even if you don’t have them stored for yourselves, they can use your computer and exploit your friends! In hacking terms, called ‘social engineering method”.
The next question come is that you have an Antivirus software to save you, isn’t it. Not, really, it takes a couple of hours to fool your antivirus, if I am using port 80 or port 8080 and my ‘signature’ not matching with what they have in the Antivirus database. Since, these ports are used for communications FTP, the hacker program that can injected with a fake authorization. For the hacker, it’s not one program, the hacker would have choice of tools to exploit these starting from Wireshark, using Honeypot or simple ARP poisoning.
What is these hacker’s main goal? To be the ‘man in the middle’! When you connect to internet, your computer, sends a request to the router, your router send the signals, to the server reads the request and send back a signal to your router, your router receives it, and send it back to the device, the one originally requested the server. The hacker, will try to secure a place between you and the router, posing as a genuine device/server and now all your signals will go through the hacker computer to the router and the server and back as relay. This way they can modify anything that goes through the hacker’s terminal including pushing a fake software update. I can go on step by step but don’t want to kill you with the jargons.
In a nutshell, hackers can move the direction of the missile, on the fly, get defense data, make banking transactions for you, or even hack into crypto currency exchanges. How do sanctions countries like North Korea survive?
Another, psychology is it’s my office computer, so why should I care? But, the hackers just need that one computer to enter your home network (when you connect from home) or enter the organizational network through you and they don’t leave your personal data out of generosity
Yes, the art of war has changed in 21st century! In some countries, kids get mandatory military training at early age, it’s probably the time to train them on cyberwarfare to be safe.
With second machine age, and 5G knocking the door, you need more cyber-solders protecting people over the military. More signal goes through the air, more the chances of someone intercepting it.
Are you ready for the new age World War -3?
Abhijit Ghosh is the CEO of StanShare, in addition to an enthusiastic learner with deep understanding of both data, technology, and concurrent people management policies and practices. An exceptional achiever, well-rounded, multilingual, culturally aware professional with a strong background in building and leading multi-discipline, geographically dispersed teams to manage complex operations and automation. Specializes in highly cross functional collaborations with Operations, Finance, HR, Data Management in financial services industry. He has over 17 years of hands-on management experience in planning, creating, data products and solutions through design thinking. Extremely skilled strategist for robotics and cognitive automation solutions.