YOU are the WEAKEST LINK
Hackers thrive on that chink in cybersecurity armor: human beings
We live on wireless. This didn’t begin in 2020, but the pandemic made it inescapable. We sit in corners of our homes, talking to our colleagues, our sisters-in-law, our book club on Zoom. Nearly half of American workers now work from home. We order groceries and gifts and tap in credit card numbers.
We depend on encryption to keep our secrets. And yet cybersecurity fails; cybercrime accelerates; privacy is fragile. A recent study found that your robot vacuum cleaner could be hacked from afar to eavesdrop on you.
This battle between encrypters and hackers isn’t simply a product of our computerized age, however. The tech fight dates to the days of telegraph lines, undersea cables and “wireless” — that is, radio. Once information was transmitted by electrical pulses, it was exposed to the world. Who knew who might be working at the cable company, or who might listen in, uninvited, to wireless transmissions?
Code makers and code breakers had existed for centuries. But the communications leap of telegraph and radio made the need for convenient, unbreakable encryption far more pressing, both for businesses and governments.
So the technology of encryption made its own leap. “If you have no good coding system, you are always running a considerable risk ... your correspondence will always be exposed to every spy ... your intended or settled contracts, your offers and important news to every inquisitive eye,” read a mid-1920s sales brochure from the Chiffriermaschinen (Cipher Machines) company of Berlin, advertising its new business device, the Enigma.
Arthur Scherbius, Enigma’s inventor, built what looked like a close relative of a typewriter. Behind the keys was a lamp board showing the letters of the alphabet.
In this story, the people we’d now call hackers were the good guys — heroes who helped defeat the Nazis. Since then, the technology of encryption
has been utterly transformed. It pervades our lives, and we want it to work. Yet the Enigma saga
remains relevant because human beings have not been transformed. The more complicated the security rules designed to protect access, the more likely that people — tired, hurried, bothered — will take shortcuts that make the system vulnerable.