Cybersecurity: The Next Great War

In a world where we spend so much time looking down at our devices, chiropractors have now started making a killing. Everything is done online from shopping at your favourite store, getting food delivered, chatting with friends and displaying your daily activities on social media, to doing your taxes and banking. All of this begs the question: how do we protect all that information?

You see, we have encountered a problem in the past decade: HACKERS. We are at war and some people still haven’t realized it. And no these aren’t your childhood movie, geeky kids with glasses, who find out their crush’s favourite movie so they can impress ‘em. We are talking about they know where you live, your social security number, banking information, and the fact that you sneak about 4 Twinkies before bed every night, kinda people.

Now I know I just made light of the situation, but in reality it has become a serious issue. Imagine if the government were to get hacked tomorrow and the hackers were able to source confidential information that could swing an election, or elect Trump president. Oh wait…

Even on a less dreary note, the past few years have yielded some seriously scaled up cyberattacks, comprising potentially hundreds of thousands of people’s personal information. Take a look at Equifax, a credit data company, was hacked last year, where in Canada alone compromised over 100,000 people’s personal information. This is no joke.

You have a regulatory agency that is basically used to determine the rate of your mortgages, being compromised. Meaning you could have been overpaying for your mortgage for the past “X” number of years.

In October of last year alone, a reported over 55 million records were leaked from various cyberattacks. The people who think “it could never happen to me” simply become part of that statistic. We are on an entirely new battlefield and we need to adapt.

We live in an incredible period of human history. Our world is more interconnected every single day than the day before it. We can keep in touch with friends who have moved all over the world, become young tech entrepreneur millionaires (if only), and even find out the best place to grab a slice in a new city.

Now all of this isn’t to say that we aren’t making a collective movement to improve our security, but it is vastly lagging behind the level of the hackers our systems are currently going up against. Companies have made a lot of money developing data protection software and hopefully their systems continue to improve, but at this rate I might as well wear a sign around saying “take my money”.

In this very moment, the majority of the planet has more computing power in their pocket than some people did running the free world not long ago. It is a crazy time to be alive and life is full of potential and amazing possibilities for the future. However, I will leave you with this thought: can we ever guarantee the protection of our data?

I hope this was somewhat thought provoking and entertaining. I know I like to make light of serious issues, because well, someone has to, but cybersecurity really is the next great battlefield and we need to be prepared for it.

Till next time, read between the lines.