CW: mentions of child pornography and exploitation

The wonders of cybertechnology might have revolutionized the world for the better, but it also created niches for…certain types of criminals. The kinds of people you never want to meet in real life. It’s a harsh reality of working in these types of cybersecurity fields, because sexual exploitation of children and human trafficking is sadly a large part of cybercrimes committed.  

Chatrooms, social media pages, and forums are also used to groom young people. There are many infamous YouTube personalities who have been caught having inappropriate contact with minors. And who can forget the absolute abhorrence that was the Josh Duggar escapade, in which a prosecutor claimed that the images and videos he possessed were some of the worst he’d ever seen.

However, that isn’t the extent of online offenders. If you have kids that play video games, beware of things called loot boxes. They are basically legalized gambling. You can pay for fake stuff with real money to get a loot box which gives you a random bit of in-game items or currency. I find microtransactions in video games deplorable in general. Online multi-player games are also mediums in which prospective pedophiles groom young children and teenagers, especially popular games like Minecraft and Fortnite. I strongly believe that there needs to be more protections concerning children being online, and not just a bunch of reactionary virtue-signaling from parents and politicians who blame video games for real-life violence.

Sorry, I kind of climbed on a soapbox there. Though I think developing cyber-policies regarding minors and online video games is essential to stop this awful child-gambling culture and prevent child exploitation. Games should be fun, not money-farming casinos. Of course, we can never predict what’s going to happen in the future in terms of cyber-techology. Unchecked capitalism isn’t going to fade away in an instant and we have to adapt to avoid the fallout.

Cyber-engineering is quite similar to cybersecurity, though cyber-engineering involves working with the physical hardware and creating software whereas cybersecurity focuses on data infrastructures. Cyber-security engineering majors need to learn fundamental mathematics and coding. Cybersecurity commonly overlaps with criminal justice because much of the curriculum concerns cyber law and recognizing types of cybercrime. Cybersecurity commonly pairs with many professions within law-enforcement and criminal justice systems, like digital forensics, crime scene investigations, and technical analysts.

What would you consider the most important cybersecurity agency in the United States? FBI? CIA? DHS? Well, the truth is, that they all work together to secure cyberspace in the US and prevent attacks that would harm citizens. Do these offices sometimes go too far to ensure security measures? I’d argue “yes.” I think some agencies sweep human ethics under the rug in some respects, like the obsessive efforts of border patrol and ICE. Since 9/11, security measures have tightened so much, sometimes it feels like a chokehold.

Though I also believe that the implementation of more cybersecurity protocols have prevented thousands of would-be terrorists from attacking innocent civilians. And yet, the most dangerous terrorist threats these days are home-grown far-right anti-government groups, not anyone across the Mexican border.

The field of cybersecurity is always evolving as is technology and human development. Who knows what the world will look like in 2030? Maybe cybersecurity measures won’t be as severe as personal microchips or having your entire genome mapped out and stored, but a lot can happen in a decade. In 1999, the IBM Microdrive was invented and it could only store 170MB and 340MB. That’s what, maybe two episodes of Law & Order in 480p? Over a decade of technological progression passes and in 2009, the terabyte hard-drive is invented, a terabyte being 1000 gigabits of data. To compare, 300MB would only take up 0.0003 of 1000GB of storage. That’s less than one percent.   

 My 29 years of interacting with technology have taught me several lessons. 1) If it seems sketchy, it probably is, so trust your gut and don’t click on it. 2) If a site tells you to turn off your Ad-Blocker, do not turn off your Ad-Blocker. 3) Incognito pages does not protect your IP address from being seen, that’s what VPNs are for.

Are you ever busy with something or playing a game on your computer and you’re suddenly inundated with pop-ups from your anti-virus software? Yeah, it’s annoying, but the nuisance is worth it if they’re keeping malware out of your computer. Sometimes your anti-virus will flag a file as infected when you know it’s not, though you never know. How would you know if Bill from accounting sent you the Excel sheets for last week and somehow laced it with a Trojan horse? And are you sure that’s going to install the program you wanted or some infected adware?

What is one thing that has made the world safer? Technology. What is one thing that has made the world scarier? Technology. What is most likely going to end human-kind? Sentient AI, probably, as Hawking predicted. But I think we can agree that technology has been both a huge boost in human development at the cost of also being a detriment to the human psyche. Think of those idealized shows from the 1950s where happy nuclear families went about their lives as though there wasn’t rampant racial inequality, conflicts happening overseas, and a polio epidemic. The thing is, they didn’t have Internet back then. They couldn’t check little devices in their pocket that gave them all the global news on a screen in seconds. They had television news, radios, and newspapers. Perhaps they were happier because they didn’t know how much was wrong in the world.

Or maybe I’m sensationalizing things. It is certainly daunting to wake up everyday to breaking news of how nonsensical wars are going or what law has taken your rights away that week. But the fact that we know what’s going on in real-time allows us to prepare for the worst. Weather reports tell us to go to the basement when a tornado touches down, you’re told what’s happening with local protests and riots. However doom and gloom the news might be, we are nonetheless informed.

 If it is one area not to cut corners in when budgeting for a business, it is cybersecurity. The risks far outweigh the costs for neglecting to protect any and all information and data. There are several instances of data breaches in large corporations due to lax security protocols. SecureWorld.io hosts a “Top 10 Data Breaches of All Time”, featuring how many people were affected by each incident, what exactly happened, and who was responsible for the damages. The First American Financial Corporation suffered a breach in 2019, affecting 885 million users. The culprit? No authentication procedures. You ever wonder why those tedious reCAPTCHAs ask you to find a certain object in a series of images? This is a measure to discern if you’re human or a bot.

Who can forget the Facebook data breach of 2019, which compromised over 540 million users? Mark Zuckerberg was already getting flack for his company’s questionable practices, from the real-name requirement for signing up for an account to his seeming apathy to the social media site being engineered as a hate-group misinformation mill. In the darker reaches of the web, your information is for sale to advertisers and people seeking to scope out your financial paper-trail in order to steal your money.

One particular heinous business transaction in recent years has been cryptocurrency, specifically NFTs. They are essentially tokens with information stored in them, which are sold for exorbitant prices. The thing with NFTs, however, is that the copyrights are sold with the tokens. That means if you have enough money to buy these useless trinkets, you can (theoretically) make money re-selling them. It’s scalping, except it’s much more idiotic. Instead of buying a scalped PS5 for three times the retail price, you are buying a hypothetical ownership of something that probably won’t be worth anything in a few years.  It’s especially trouble that video game companies are hocking these NFTs to players, including children, for more microtransaction purposes.

In conclusion, cybersecurity is good and NFTs are bad, but somehow legal.

With any security protocols implemented, there’s always going to be bad actors taking it as a challenge. There’s always a risk in taking on new employees and giving them access to information systems within companies. They can sign waivers and agreements promising to be honest and protect company trade secrets, but ultimately it is an honor code arrangement. You won’t believe some of the ways people have abused online database systems.

Four years ago, I worked at a call center that did tech support for a cable company and we heard the story of an elderly woman who worked the phones. You couldn’t have pens, paper, cellphones, or books with you on the call center floor (for obvious reasons) but you could bring along your knitting or crocheting to do while you talked customers through troubleshooting. This woman, honest-to-God, recorded credit and debit card numbers with her knitting stitches. After all, you wouldn’t suspect a sweet old grandmother of credit card fraud!

You need to be careful when inputting data into computers, especially in public settings. Social engineering techniques don’t just happen online, they happen in your physical surroundings. Always be wary of people standing behind you while you’re typing personal information into a computer. Shoulder surfing involves someone looking over a person’s shoulder as they’re inputting information and remembering email addresses, names, even keystrokes for passwords. This is why offices have bullpens and dividers and why computers are positioned in ways that aren’t easily viewable by passersby. Many business environments have strict rules against employees having cellphones on the workplace floor. Yes, it’s tedious and sometimes inconvenient, but the rules exist because people have done illegal things, like taking photos of credit cards and using skimmers. Maybe the business implements these rules to protect themselves from liability more than protecting their employees, but it’s better than nothing.

Electronic information has replaced paper files in the Information Age, optimizing transactions, personal records, and communication across the World Wide Web. Talking online with someone in another country in minutes rather than weeks or months is a feat only thought possible in science fiction. The Internet revolutionized not only the field of information technology but thousands of professions and careers.

But with the increasing evolution of technology and its intricacies forever being taken advantage of, even the most cutting-edge cybersecurity programs still need humans to maintain security protocols, especially when it comes to storing data and information. A person’s data online should be as protected as though it were gathered behind a locked door and stored in a vault.

However, data storage and protection isn’t as cut and dried in practice as it is in theory. There are four different ethical issues concerning data privacy:

• Protecting data from unauthorized access
• Accuracy of data procured by automated collectors
• Availability of data to legal owners
• Inappropriate uses or inappropriate means of collecting data

According to isasca.org: “Data privacy protection is complex due to socio-techno risk, a new security concern. This risk occurs with the abuse of technology that is used to store and process data.” Data breaches can happen on purpose and on accident. For instance, if a company employee takes home a USB drive with privileged, protected data stored on it and the data happens to be stolen through the employee’s personal computer or device, they could be held accountable.

Sometimes the bureaucratic red tape, firewalls, and physical barriers around personal data can be tedious to cross through if you are the authorized user to the data you wish to access. However, this is the point of such cybersecurity hurdles, to make it difficult to access the data stored within the company’s network infrastructure. After all, what’s worse? Having to wait a few days to access your data or cleaning up a massive data breach resultant of lapse security protocols?

In comparison to the United States, did you know that Scandinavian countries have the most secure cybersecurity systems? According to compirtech.com, Finland only hosts a 1.06% of cell phones infected with malware and only a tiny 0.02% in Demark are affected by ransomware. Y’all want to emigrate to Denmark with me?

Sources:

My inspiration to pursue a future in cybersecurity stems from a favorite (and loathed) American pastime – watching television, or more specifically, watching crime shows on various streaming services. Albeit the fictional stories and portrayals of law enforcement and cybersecurity aren’t exactly accurate depictions of these careers, I could forgive the anomalies and take each episode’s story with a pinch of salt. Some television shows have laughable understandings of what hacking actually is, like the original NCIS with its infamous scene of Abby Sciuto attempting to catch a hacker withTimothy McGee assisting by typing on the same keyboard to hack faster. Uh, not exactly how that works.

Possibly, the most accurate portrayal of someone working in cybersecurity is Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds, the eccentric and bubbly optimist who helps the team as a technical analyst. Hackers have been portrayed in media as shadowy loner types who keep themselves hidden away in a room full of computer monitors, always using their powers for evil and personal gain. Criminal Minds broke that mold by showing you a human being, a shining beacon who believes in the inherent good of humanity, even throughout the horrible things she and the team witness on a daily basis. She uses her skills for good, saving lives with each and every detail she finds to help out the team.

Too long have computer-savvy people been perceived as “nerds” and “geeks” by the social norm and mass media. This anti-intellectualism is dangerous because it trivializes the cyberwars happening daily across the planet. Terrorism and political espionage have evolved alongside technology and things you see on the Internet day after day may seem benign at first glance can be part of a conspiracy deeper than you could have imagined. Take the likes of Qanon, an online cult created from a mysterious online presence only known as “Q”. What started in a Reddit post branched out over the Internet, across social media, across mass media like wildfire. These terroristic conspiracies about the 2020 election of President Biden being fraudulent have even gotten a voice in Congress through Marjorie Taylor Greene and allegedly the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas.

Sorry if I stepped on a political soapbox there for a second. I am passionate about cybersecurity because I believe it is a field on the frontline of defense against terrorism, fascism, and war. It’s not just cybersecurity majors who study such an extensive field. I have an Associate’s Degree in Information Systems Technology and many of my classes were about laws regarding cybersecurity and cybercrime. Business majors might also have cybersecurity credit requirements for many businesspersons need to know how to keep their businesses secure since most transactions are done online. Those seeking degrees in Administration or Management might find cybersecurity important because the workings of manufacturing, warehousing, retailing, merchandising, and payrolling are done through the use of computers and phones.