Digital Armageddon

Bitcoin Price Tumbles After Massive Account Hack and Sell-Off on Trading Site Mt.Gox - Gizmodo

Ok. So maybe that particular piece of fiction turning to reality is not exactly just around the corner. But we are inching our way there. My theme for the last post was digital Armageddon. Apparently it continues.

Bitcoin, for the neophyte, is a digital currency. It was created to "revolutionize" global economy. In fact, It's complex enough that I have no shame in stating that I am largely clueless about how it works. Finance was never my forte.

The unique thing about Bitcoin is that you can generate it yourself. Just like RBI or Federal Reserve Banks print currency, with the proper software kit, you can generate this digital currency on your local machine. No doubt at this point you will be "Hah!"-ing at the fact that if you can generate money yourself, it will have absolutely no value whatsoever. Wrong. Bitcoin generation is tightly controlled using P2P network and hardware encryption and only a fixed amount of Bitcoins are actually allowed into the economy and in a controlled manner. Which is why Bitcoins are (or were, as you will read) running at a whopping exchange rate of $17.50

Until someone pulled an "Ocean" on the Bitcoin market. Much like ordinary currency and/or stocks and shares, if someone comes and tries to offload a huge amount into the market, the value goes down. Plummets, in fact. Now it's next to impossible to be able to generate a huge amount of Bitcoin instantaneously, there are people out the who did get into the act early on. Unfortunately one of these individuals had their account hacked and the hacker tried to off-load the entire stash and tried to sell the Bitcoins to themselves and then exchange it for cash, about $1000. Bitcoins crashed to a few pennies in a matter of hours.
Fortunately safeguards and alarm bells saved the day and MT.Gox stopped the fiasco. In fact, they reversed all exchanges for 20 Jun 2011 to bring the Bitcoin back to $17.50

What's this got to do with Digital Armageddon? We are living in a digital age where valuable information is cheap. And hackers are having a field day because every one goes open-source with whatever exploit they manage to find in the name of justice. Bitcoin has certain flaws in that they hardly have any password system. Just a digital signature which is a file that can be copied a it too easily for comfort.

Unfortunately we work with 100GBs of space which we use indiscriminately along with Operating Systems with security holes that are half the reason we have ended up in this muck. Our personal laptops and official PCs are filled with tons of cookies, "temporary files", unprotected Word docs and lord know what that are a gold mine for the people with the wrong intent. Corporate are not much better at protecting this data and it's just a dream come true for hackers. And here we are working to moving all our personal, medical, financial data online at our very finger-tips without pausing to see that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming our way.

Anti Bore rating: 3/5 BTC

Armageddon Online!

If you have been following the news lately, you won't be surprised to know of the various hack attacks that have been plaguing the WWW. In fact it has become a trend and hackers are now vying for "Anonymous Celebrity" status.

UPDATE: I'll try updating this list as I come across interesting news
March 2011   - Pentagon suffered the most damaging cyberattack till date
April 20 2011 - Sony PSN and Qriocity hacked to steal credit card info of customers
May 10 2011 - Citibank was hacked to steal financial data of more than 210,000 customers
May 17 2011 - RSA announced it was hacked and Security Tokens were compromised
May 20 2011 - Lockheed, manufacturer of high end aero-weapons  was "almost" hacked
June 01 2011 - Gmail accounts of politicians and activists hacked
June 27 2011 - Washington Post hacked. 1.27MM accounts compromised.
June 28 2011 - Universal Music and Viacom hacked
July 02 2011 - Florida Voter Database leaked


The list is endless. There is an excellent post of the timeline of hacks by Lulz. Unfortunately most people don't seem to be realize the acceleration of these attacks. Since last year the hackers have been speeding up and attacking more high profile targets. And the one thing that has become absolutely certain is that trusting your personal data to big companies is not a good idea.

This excellent video about STUXNET is an excellent infovid about the anatomy of a manufactured virus that has the potential to affect facilities like nuclear reactors, power grids, oil rigs and so forth.

Here's an extremely detailed read about how STUXNET was discovered: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1

Things are quickly spiraling and there is no one to keep watch. The next few months will be interesting to say the least. If you've seen 12 monkeys, you'd know of the concept of a man releasing a virus that wipes out humanity from the face of the planet. To say that there is a possibility that a virus/worm that has the potential to bring down the WWW is hardly a case of fiction any more. But hey, look at the bright side: people may step out and see the sun more often.

Anti-Bore rating: 4/5 Nukes!