Risks of the evolving technology
Technology is evolving at a very fast pace, it has changed the way we communicate, the way we study, the way we pay bills, the way we shop, the way we keep up with the current happenings, the way we share data, the way we travel, the way we search for a job and many more. Everything has advanced so drastically that we all are very busy trying to keep up with it and none of us are looking back for a second the risks it can put us in.
Now-a-days we use many apps, actually let me put it this way, we have become so dependent on them. To eat, to travel, to shop, to communicate, to make transactions, we use various applications. During this process knowingly or unknowingly we end up sharing our personal information with them and are making ourselves vulnerable. For example we are sharing our live day to day location with google maps, maybe google wouldn’t use it against us but what if some external entity gets their hands on this data, can you imagine how dangerous it is. Don’t tell me that data leakage is not possible, it has happened before and it can happen again. In the past many companies like Target, Facebook etc have faced data breaches. See, the main point is that the companies have to cover all the possible loose ends, but the attacker need to find only one loose end to hack.
The most common and unthought way of sharing our info is through printers and scanners. Back in the days for every copy, we had to print the page again. To avoid that redundancy, storable printers came up which store the file first and then print the required number of copies. There is it again.
We are making ourselves open to risks not only by sharing our information, there are many other ways too. Let me give one more simple example. Passwords, we never set strong passwords. The passwords we set are easily guessable. Statistics show that more than 6,00,000 Facebook accounts are compromised every single day.
We also use facebook to login into other apps to avoid setting up the account from start. As we obviously don’t read the terms and conditions, we wouldn’t know what data is being shared to these apps by facebook. Few apps take data like images, our events etc which I think are not absolutely necessary for account set up. You can view “which apps can get access to what data” settings in https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications&apps_only.
The next one is, Piracy. I don’t think we ever thought that this could make us vulnerable. With the notion of saving some bucks, we download softwares, movies and what not from illegal sites. The thing is the uploader can attach some scripts to the these files which can give him access to our systems. And voila. We might think what can the hacker possibly do by getting access to our system as we may not have any valuable information, let me tell you, sometimes by using your system you can be framed for a bigger attack.
We are in a phase where data is everything. There’s no doubt that using it to analyse various predictions has made our lives a hundred times better. But if we are not careful enough, it can put us in grave danger.
