7 thoughts on “Google Studies Hackers”

1. This article is really interesting, and I hope that google goes on to create ways to be able to stop people from hacking. Hacking peoples accounts is a very serious issue, and has a negative impact on our society. Some stuff that I do to protect myself from hackers is to create a password longer than 10 characters, as mentioned in class. Also I make sure to have software on my computer to detect against viruses and spyware. Another thing that I do is try to learn what these viruses may look like, so I don’t fall for them. In class we were taught what many of these hackers use to try to trick us. I think that by having these taught in schools and Universities is a great way to create awareness for students. Although hacking is a major threat to everyday people, I think that it is even more dangerous for our government and society. There are people out there that hack things that are harmful to peoples health. This needs to be stopped, and should have very harsh punishments. I read an article about a hackers that are trying to shut down power grids. I don’t understand why anyone would want to do this, and what benefit they are having. Attached is the article, and I hope that in the future our protection against hackers strengthens.

   http://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-pose-an-increasingly-dire-threat-to-the-power-grid-2017-11

2. Nowadays, too much of our generation is too care-free with their information. They enter their credit card information to various websites and post pictures of themselves doing illegal or highly frowned upon activities. In my opinion, it makes me feel secure that a prestige company like Google is studying the actions of hackers. Even though this makes me feel good about my online safety, Google saying that “15 percent of web users report having an account breached by hackers, although that number could certainly be much higher” does not make me feel good. I think another crucial aspect to this topic is the liability factor. Even though I do not know much about the topic, I don’t understand who specifically is held accountable for this. Obviously the hackers are the ones who committed the hacking, but Google (or whatever other website gets hacked with my information) let it happen. Yes, maybe they tried to stop it, but they didn’t, and there will always be someone held accountable for everything in this world.

3. I am very glad and relieved to hear that Google has been studying hacker and their trends. This has always been a major concern for me. I think about my privacy every single day. We are living in a world that is so technology centered and it just scares me often to know that so many people are connected to the internet at one time. It is very amazing but it is highly dangerous especially when their are criminals and privacy invaders who are looking to take and expose victims who use the internet. I hope that this study stays constant as we are constantly adding new data bases and technology to our networks. I also hope that experts are working on how to prevent the access of our privacy. In regards to personal information such as social security and credit card information. There are many who fall victim to identity theft and credit card fraud. I have always been cautious when entering my credit card information online. I never put my social security number online. I am old school when it comes to personality information such as. A lot of people are too comfortable with putting their information out there as well as pictures of themselves. I think people should be more cautious when it comes to putting their information out there. I believe that a lot of times people fail to remember that when you put something on the internet it is there forever. So it is important to change passwords as often as you can and post less personal information about themselves. I know there is other ways to prevent hackers from accessing our information. With the help of Google studying how these hackers are operating and with users being more careful online, there will definitely be more security. I think it is important to be aware of what harm can be done online.

4. Nowadays, users of the internet experience less and less privacy due to the overwhelming amount of information that entities collect about our daily activities. This has become a problem because there really is nothing that a user has to do in particular to be on a companies radar. Simply moving from site to site leaves enough of a trail for people to find out information about individuals surfing the web. People can take precautions such as making their passwords more complex or longer and investing in computer security software, but they are still technically being watched. Companies want to know about them and learn about their lives, but people should have a say in whether or not companies are allowed to store information about them. Social media, online shopping, and regular searches all add information to the database that companies have on individuals. It is difficult to monitor and protect these people’s information when they use these sites on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it does not seem like the information pool that data brokers have will shrink anytime soon.

5. As we talked about in class, just making your password ten characters instead of six could mean the difference between someone accessing your information, or keeping it safe and protected. This is my way of protecting myself from hackers. For people like me who do a lot of their shopping online I think it’s also critical to change the numbers on your credit/debit cards annually. This way, if your information was unfortunately part of the 3.3 billion credentials taken, the card would be useless after being sold on the darknet or respective black market. I know a lot of people who have had their Identity stolen, but I am not one of them, maybe I am just lucky. Securing my information may contribute to this as well, I think with the rise of businesses and people using crypto currency shows a desire for people to make safer transactions that hackers wont have access to. This challenges the majority who do not want tighter security on technology platforms but the future of cybersecurity I envision being much tighter with security and 100% safe transactions would be the standard.

6. The idea of someone hacking into one of my accounts has always freaked me out. However, I was not aware of how common it was. I think society as a whole does not realize how much information about ourselves is up on the internet. When reading part of the excerpt that talked about the amount of information people put up on the internet about themselves, I thought about this video that I watched in marketing class this semester (I tried to find the link to the video on Youtube was unable to). Basically, in the video there was a man who set up a tent at some type of event who claimed to be a mind reader/psychic. So, with each person that came in for a session he told them things about themselves that they found surprising. The people even made comments like “Wow, not many people know that” and “There is no way you could have known that”, etc. However, at the end of the video it revealed the true secret. A curtain fell down in the tent and revealed a bunch of people with a large computer monitor with each person’s social media profile up on it. These people behind the curtain had been communicating with the “mind-reader/psychic” through an ear piece. Just by pulling up these people’s basic social media profiles, they were able to determine a lot of personal information about them. I found this to be extremely unsettling. What was even more interesting was how shocked these people were that the man was able to know all that stuff about them. Granted they thought he was actually a mind-reader, but that just goes to show that people are not even aware of how much personal information they put up on things like their Facebook pages and other social media pages like that. This absolutely creates a problem when it comes to all the hackers out there. I think society as a whole need to better monitor what they post and keep personal information to themselves.

7. Access to our information and data has become a huge problem, and we just become more susceptible to new kinds of attacks as technology improves. An article I read from CBS News detailed some of the different ways you can try and prevent attacks today. One interesting piece of information I read was that in a couple of states, there is no legal obligation for companies to tell customers if their personal data has been hacked, or if there is a security breach in their system. Although these kinds of attacks can end up being a PR nightmare, as someone studying PR, it is always better to be honest and make the situation better than to keep it hidden and pretend it doesn’t exist. The media will always find out. It is scary to me that not all companies are being required to share this important information with consumers. The article also talked about phishing schemes similar to the ones we discussed in class, such as when hackers send you emails to your Gmail account that look legitimate. I think we need better education on these phishing schemes, because they often succeed when people are not aware that they are possible. Finally, the article talked about passwords, which is a topic that people often like to ignore. The facts are, we all know that we need to have longer, more complicated passwords, and different passwords for every site. However, we still don’t do it. We are more concerned with being able to remember our login information than protecting our own security. The article suggests using programs that can keep track of your passwords, but what happens if those programs are hacked? Cybersecurity is an important issue, but it continues to be an issue because it doesn’t always have an easy solution.

   Gunaratna, S. (2017, March 28). New hacks, new defenses: Latest tips to protect against data breaches. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from CBS News website: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/online-security-tips-how-to-protect-yourself-hackers-data-breaches/