Untold Power: The World of Internet Hackers

Many things have changed over the last few decades…

The way we communicate, the way we do business, the way we meet people…

Computer and the internet have made the world both bigger and smaller at the same time.

This hyper-expansion of our world has brought people from different countries, different cultures and different worlds closer than ever before, yet at the same time, further apart.

Our differences are now highlighted and shown live and living color – 24 hours a day – and it’s the differences that are leading us down a dangerous road.

One because one of the many things that have changed in the 21st Century are the methods of which war is and will be waged going forward.

Now this isn’t about unmanned tanks or drones – or even nanotechnology – this is about an even dirtier and potentially more debilitating form of fighting…

Cyberwarfare.

Cyberwarfare is being waged right now. So much so, world governments have been forced to employ their own team of hackers in order to not only defend their country from attacks, but also to engineer counter attacks or pre-emptive attacks of their own.

We’ve heard the terms before…

Sabotage, espionage, surveillance – all tools spies and double agents used to ply their trade just 20 years ago – can now be done by a pimply-faced teenager sitting in his parent’s basement.

It’s frightening how one person with access to the internet can wield the power of an arsenal of nuclear weapons by hacking their way through firewalls and unprotected systems – with the capability to fire with just a push of a button.

One barely has to do any research to find instances of cyber terrorism incidents the rest of the world either don’t know about or heard only whispers about. Look at just a few of the battles fought over the web at just a glance…

• China, one of the world’s biggest instigators of cyberwarfare, has waged attacks against both The New York Times and The Washington Post. These attacks were espionage operations designed to uncover names of Chinese dissidents that may be sources of the political and socioeconomic happenings in their country to these news outlets.
• Twitter was hacked, an attack that affected 250,000 accounts. Twitter acknowledged that his wasn’t attack wasn’t a prank or an accident, they allege that it was carried out by professionals with an agenda.

• NetSeer, and internet advertising company, was hacked. Their site was infected by malware, causing content to be blocked by Google and other internet gateways.

• Hacker collective, Anonymous, took aim at the banking sector, and reportedly posted 4,000 login credentials for senior banking officials. Anonymous also hacked into (repeatedly, it turns out) and defaced two government Web sites.

• The Department of Homeland Security advised users to disable UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n Play) technology – a key technology that makes it easier to connect devices like printers to internal networks. Over 80 million devices were identified in an Internet-wide scan as being vulnerable to accepting and executing malevolent code payloads.

And these are just the crimes that were discovered!! Imagine how many went unnoticed?

But these incidents are NOTHING compared to what the world’s best hackers could do…

How far can their reach stretch?

Well, it’s not inconceivable that a hacker team could, with relative ease, break the backbone of the World Wide Web.

Now to some, this doesn’t sound like it would be all that damaging, like being transported back to 1994, but…

When taken into account how much business is conducted over the internet, and we’re not talking about the over $9 Billion in commerce, an internet crash could potentially be as destructive as a nuclear bomb.

The worst thing is…

There’s nothing anybody can do about it.

Or is there?

There are protocols being put in place to circumnavigate the web if this ever happens…

If you think of the internet as the “information super highway” that it has come to be known as, then these defensive measures would be like “information flyovers” or maybe even “information subways”.

And in the event of the World Wide Web being broken, these alternate pathways will be what allow business to continue as normal…

For those who have paid a HEFTY sum for the service.

Companies that depend on the internet are already making contingency plans for this, what some call, inevitable catastrophe…

Billion dollar companies like Microsoft, Amazon and others have already put their faith, and dollars, into these “alternative internet” companies in order to ensure that their business doesn’t suffer from a full on world cyberwar.

It makes one wonder if we have become too advanced for our own good…

Too dependent on technology for our livelihoods…

It’s a thought we all must keep in mind – but much like Pandora’s Box – it seems that the internet, once embraced, can’t be abandoned.

The only thing we can do, is prepare to the best of our abilities…

Forewarned is fore armed.