ANOTHER VOICE murray swart Digital footprint exposure
IF YOU have never fallen victim to cybercrime you are either very lucky, very tech savvy or very mistaken. Should you tend towards the third category, chances are that news of the massive leak of the personal data of tens of millions of South Africans was hardly cause for concern.
Afterall, from a news perspective, it’s been one of those weeks where local current affairs have had us glued to our seats.
Between the antics of our first family and their tussle with the judicial system, cabinet reshuffles and much much more, we have truly been entertained by that interactive soap opera that is our existence in the RS of A. These are the days of our lives, filled with so much excitement that these pages of history may well end up stuck together.
There have been other things to worry about this week so you can be forgiven if the exposure of enough private information to commit identity fraud against in excess of 30 million people didn’t grab your interest.
This may be the biggest cybersecurity breach we have experienced and only time will tell whether the repercussions will leave us devastated.
However, it is unlikely to be the last attack and is by no means the first.
In September 2016, the new eThekwini eServices website was launched but someone messed up.
E-mails of nearly 100 000 residents, complete with passwords, were posted for the world to see as those faithful public servants from the KZN capital all and sundry to download utility bills without sufficient authentication. Oops.
This was not an isolated incident as 2016 also saw a security flaw in Ster-Kinekor’s systems compromise some six million accounts when 1.6 million unique e-mail accounts, along with users’ date of birth, gender name, passwords, physical address, phone numbers and language preference, were leaked.
Hackers have been able to worm their way into weird and wonderful places, phishing, liberating, robbing, rescuing and ruining every step of the way. No organisation is too big, nor individual too insignificant, to be exempt.
Give a man a gun and he can steal millions but give him a flashdisk, a smile and a few lines of code and we start talking billions. Then again, give him a pen and he can steal the world.
Cyberwars and crimes can easily be fatal as was proven in 2010 when Kaspersky discovered Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm, believed to be the product of an Israeli/American collaboration, that had infiltrated the Iranian nuclear weapons program, causing extensive havoc. This malware showed just how dangerous ones and zeros could potentially be when weaponised.
Nuclear winter maybe but a ctrl, alt, something, away but for now, it might be wiser to concern yourself with the drippings of your own digital footprint.
Knowing that your biographical information, accompanied by everything else that is required to prove that you are you (even when used by someone else) is ripe for the taking is bad enough but what if our visits to those unmentionable parts of the net were also in the public domain?
The breach of Ashley Madison, a matchmaking website with an expressed focus on infidelity, lead to distrust, divorce and even death while porn sites have proven to be particularly enticing for hackers.
Just ask Brazzers, a global leader in adult entertainment, who also fell prey to a leak of personal info of millions of account holders. These included a certain government official who deemed it wise to use his Hantam Municipality e-mail address to register for the site.