High tech

Computer Users As Much To Blame As Hackers For The Mess We're In

When cyber security professionals converged in Las Vegas last week to expose vulnerabilities and swap hacking techniques at Black Hat and Defcon, a consistent theme emerged: the internet is broken, and if we don’t do something soon, we risk permanent damage to our economy. In his Black Hat keynote speech, tech security guru Dan Kaminsky said, “Half of all Americans are backing away from the net due to fears regarding security and privacy." According to The Guardian, Kaminsky and other speakers said the global cybersecurity threat is made up of a combination of users' failure to back up data, users clicking on virus-laden links and downloading rogue files bursting with malware, and increasingly sophisticated cyber-criminals who use ransomware to turn ordinary people and companies into ATM's. Kaminsky called for a federal agency devoted to security issues, similar to the National Institutes of Health, that can “create engineering solutions to the real-world security problems that we have”. He said, "It can’t just be two guys. I need a pile of nerds to be able to work for on this 10 years. We can support health and energy and roads and cars, but somehow we can’t support the thing that is driving our economy right now? That’s crazy.”