With hackers on the loose we need to secure our online defences

Modern life presents many fresh opportunities for us to take technological wonders for granted. Until, that is, they fail or are attacked by those with evil, or at least vandalistic, intent.

The world experienced the effect of that complacency once again during the outages that have struck major websites in recent days. Of course, no lives were lost as a result of Twitter not being its usually vibrant self (indeed some might argue that the respite represented a modest, if temporary, improvement in the global quality of digital life). Not much lasting damage was inflicted because there was a denial of service on Spotify or Reddit, but there is so much else that is vitally dependent on a reliable internet that we have to take this apparent attack seriously.

It is said that the internet of things, already fast evolving, is particularly vulnerable to failure or attack by hackers – and thus disruption to domestic life on an unprecedented scale. So much commerce is conducted online, so many financial transactions, and so many medical records, to name but three of the more important dependencies, that the world should be concerned, if not shocked, that it seems to be so easy to bring these functions down.

It is time, then, to take a look at the plumbing, to explore the interstices of the internet to identify the weaker links and secure them. Not many people will have heard of the likes of Dyn, a company that directs users to websites and which was attacked in recent days. Few also realise that their own web-connected devices, from webcams to printers, may have been infected by malware that can be directed remotely. It takes tens of millions of such devices to make an attack effective; but there is such a mass of gadgets out there, and the security they are fitted with so flimsy, that acquiring access to them is both tempting and easy.

There are national and international bodies that can deal with these sorts of issues, with simple solutions such as more sophisticated factory-set passwords, but little has been done. Imagine if the water supply or the motorways or the gas supply could be made to seize up as easily as it is for the web to be successfully broken (at least over substantial chunks of its infrastructure). There would be action, for sure. Indeed, before very much longer those supplies and services may also be internet-dependent. Yet digital collapse seems only to invite a collective shrug and the inevitable advice from IT departments to “try turning it off and on again”.

The criminals, hostile foreign governments and crank hackers who can do us real cyber-harm don't have to be that smart to wreck our lives; but that is mainly because the security agencies, web businesses, individual consumers and gadget manufacturers are so astonishingly careless. One day we may lose much more than some random Tweets.

Now, when was the last time you changed your password?