info-social Security

In the past years, most of the shocking international news headlines were usually along the lines of terrorism, economic downfalls and natural disasters. All of them are quite physical or at least visible in nature. The effects were easily seen, with people being displaced by war and tsunamis or the increasing number of poor people and riots in nations where the younger generation of adults are deprived of economic benefits.

In just the last month or so however, a less obvious, a less visible threat has been shown to the world, although not for the first time, but more than it has in recent years. Breaches of information security through the internet and communication networks have stolen the headlines. The first, was probably Anonymous, who did enough to get its name on international news, with its effects reaching as far as Malaysia. Hacking became a buzzword for a while and has found its cotinuity with News of the World convicted of hacking phones in the UK.

It reminds me of how fragile information security is on the internet. Most of us, including myself trust the security of information like our e-mails to the service providers, let it be Google, Microsoft or what have you. We trust our phone service providers that our conversations wouldn’t be hacked into occasionally by mischievous stalkers and the like. The thing is, how do we really know we're protected? Quite frankly, I think we all know the answer to that question, and that is, we don’t know. If the internet is so secure, how is it that hackers can gain access to corporate databases that are probably a lot more secure than the hard disks of our personal machines?

It is impossible to be fully protected on the internet. The saying, ‘if there’s a will, there’s a way,’ fully applies to obtaining information on the internet. If someone wants to hack you and they’re good enough, they can do it, no question. The end game then is how much damaging information can somebody find out about you on the internet?

Just this blog alone, which I open to anybody who wishes to read it, to some extent is a wealth of information for somebody who might want to make a dossier on me for whatever reason. Have you ever published content on blogs or social networking applications that may cause damage to your reputation or enable legal action against you? Its a good question to ask yourself.

A false sense of security arises when we feel there’re real ways to protect ourselves though security settings or options provided by the blogging, photo sharing or social networking platforms we use. To me at least, a simple fact remains, that is, once you’ve put something up on the internet, its there ‘permanently’. I’ll explain this.

Once we’ve uploaded a picture, a status update or blog entry on the web and we then delete it, who’s to say it hasn’t already been copied by the system you’re using or by somebody else? Those who have deleted social network accounts who then re-join at a later time would know their old contacts list is recommended to them straight away.

Some people restrict access of status updates on social networks, but forget that once a friend comments on that status, pretty much everyone else on that friend’s contact list can see that same update. Authors of private blogs claim self-only access, but if they wanted to document private information (which is already a questionable action to begin with), why would they even put it on the web in the first place?

Search engines like Google even allow access to certain deleted web pages through the use of cached pages. Even deleted images from web pages can still appear as a thumbnail through a search via Google Images, another form of cached information. People who have been affected by such things have never succeded in deleting every compromising video or photo of themselves on the web, because its impossible. It’d be as difficult as counting sand, a never ending process you wouldn’t have enough time for anyway.

Sometimes we get ‘lucky’ with deleting compromising information from our own blogs or social networks, just before anybody else sees or cares enough about it. However, some are not so fortunate. The threat of information security is not new to Malaysia, and recent hacks by the Anonymous movement into Malaysian websites aren't even good examples. Malaysians would know news from years past of women that have been blackmailed by ex-lovers due to sex videos that they had threatened to circulate on the internet. That’s something a lot more serious, and something very real.

At the end of it, you can only be compromised as much as you tell. There are some things that are meant to be shared, and some things that aren’t, especially on the internet. Wisdom is required, and that’s why the saying, ‘Be careful with what you say,’ really is timeless. We don’t have to be paranoid and close every internet social network account, but it helps not to be ignorant and to be careful with how we do use the internet. So to anyone who reads, just be careful out there, all right? =)