Everything Is Vulnerable

Every other day we hear about a tool that has a vulnerability. It’s been the servers we use, Flash, or Silverlight, or the Jeep that was hacked.

This Is Not New

The idea that hacking like this is new or novel is, let’s be honest, naive. In the 1800s, people used to hack into the newly born telephone system. Before that, we didn’t call it hacking, we called it conning. Yes, the confidence games people played to get others to trust them and then rip them off is the same idea as a hack.

A hacker is someone who finds a weakness in a computer system and exploits it to some benefit. Early bank penetration tests, the ones to see if they could get at your money, were as much social engineering as technical skill. A ‘hack’ is simply something taking advantage of an exploitable weakness. This is not new to anyone or anything.

The Scale Has Changed

The primary difference between the hacks of old and the ones today is the scale of those hacks. Hacks used to be very personal for a reason: there was no world wide network. Your hacks had to be local and careful, because no one trusted the stranger. You can to build up credibility before taking your win. Of course, now we have near instant communication with the entire world. That means it’s milliseconds to access the server of someone in Africa, all from your happy NYC Starbucks.

The difference is that now, when someone says “And Flash has a security vulnerability” the number of people impacted is in the millions. And the number of people who can be hurt by it is, similarly, high.

We’ve spend years trying to create a global internet, and in doing so we’ve quickly shared communicable internet diseases with each other.

Nothing Is Unhackable

My boss and I were chatting about the ways one might hack the stock exchange, and he pointed out that one of the ways they slowed down trades was by having a really long cable.

This cable, and yes it’s real, is literally used to create a small delay in processing of orders, to level the playing field with traders. In short, it makes sure that the trades from across the ocean run at the same speed as the ones for the people in the room of the New York Stock Exchange. Each additional mile of fiber-optic cable adds 8 microseconds to a transaction, which adds up to 304 microseconds. Among other things this is hard to hack. You can’t send a software signal faster than it goes (physics being what it is), so it made things harder to hack.

The next Mission Impossible movie will involve Tom Cruise being slowly lowered into the box with that cable in order to shorten it invisibly. Only Cruise can do it because only he is small enough.

That was my joke. But it’s actually rather demonstrative to the point. You can physically hack things as well.

Analyze The Risk

To quote my father, “What can go wrong? How likely is it? What are the consequences?”

That’s why I don’t own a wifi pluggable garage door or thermostat. Do I think they’re cool? Yes. Do I think they could make much of my life easier? Yes! But they’re new and they’re toys, which means people spend a lot of time poking at them and digging into the underlayer to see how and why they work. Which means people are finding hacks daily.

That means the likelihood of someone figuring out how to use my thermostat to drive my budget through the roof is pretty high. Someone already did that to his ex-wife if that review is to be believed. Of course he had the access in the first place, but it proves one point. If you get access, you can do things.

Change it to my garage door? Or my front door? Say good bye to my things. I know I’d be a target because I’m using the pricy toys to start with.

Educate Yourself

If you can not do stupid things, the odds of you being hacked are low.

By stupid things, I mean using insecure passwords. I mean logging in on public WiFi to do your banking. I mean installing any old plugin on a WordPress site running a store.

The things you know are dangerous.

Don’t be stupid. Make backups. Be prepared for disaster.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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