Merry Christmas!!
Outside of all the regular Christmas hustle and bustle, one of the biggest news stories of the month (especially in the business world) has been the cyber-attacks on Sony US. Despite the realism behind these otherwise idle threats, this attack may have been the greatest thing for us. Make no mistake that it was truly an attack; then compare it to attacks on skyscrapers and government buildings. In each case, there were lessons we learned as a nation, but unlike those tragedies, the only destruction here was a stupid movie with a classless plot. Personally, I thought we were already ahead by losing "The Interview" in the first place. Its premise made me cringe when I saw it first advertised at the MTV Video Music Awards in September. Then again, I also remembered how awful "Buffalo '66" was.
More importantly, however, the takeaway in this case is protecting our cyber information. There has never been a hack job of this magnitude (that we know of) since the rise of the Internet, so our security measures have gotten really lax. Before 9/11, our airport security being woefully undermined was the worst kept secret in the world. Even "Family Guy" aptly joked about it in 2000, complete with a punchline referencing Osama bin Laden. Our online security may benefit from an overhaul of inconvenience as well, but mostly, individuals need to apply their own common sense.
I had always known that the Internet is a very impersonal means of communication. Not just impersonal in the social sense, where one read through the troll comments on CNN.com or YouTube would validate the position, but also impersonal in the sense of privacy. A couple of my first "online friends" were skilled hackers, so I felt first- and second-hand of how little privacy existed online.
My second-hand account came at the expense of a budding celebrity at the time. It was about 1999 when the WWF was nearing new heights of popularity. There was a popular wrestler named Jeff Hardy who, in real life, was a real "artist" type. He was a drawer, a musician, an motorbike obstacle course runner, and a pro wrestler to top off the list. He was a favorite among the Internet Wrestling Community. Within my circle of online friends, drawings started circulating that were attributed to Jeff Hardy. We were all wrestling fans, so the images were widely praised. But they immediately chilled me, knowing that if the story were true, then these files were not for our enjoyment. The story was that someone (at face value, it was someone within our circle of friends) allegedly hacked into his personal computer and retrieved the files. There was nothing explicitly wrong with the art, only the means of access to them. If it could happen to Jeff Hardy, I knew it could happen to anyone. In fact, I had already had my own first-hand account, so this incident merely reinforced my knowledge.
My first-hand account was a year or two earlier. Back when group emails were the popular method of social networking (before social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace, or even Friendster), I had my own friends. Like any group of college friends, we had periods of disliking each other and we had arguments and disagreements within the group. In one such instance, I was emailing back and forth with one of the girls in our group about another member of our group.
Within a few minutes, I received an email directly the guy who we were badmouthing that kindly noted he knew I was talking to her and I had "said quite enough." He and I happened to both live in Phoenix, so he was the only person in the group that I met in person. During one such visit, he shared with me the pictures of this girl in our group, which he had obtained by hacking into her computer. Therefore, when I received his passive threat, I knew he had seen what I had written.
I had two minds about it: first, he got more than what he went looking for when he found that not everybody in our group cared for him personally, and second, this is why "if you cannot say something nice, don't say anything at all" is a valuable cliché.
Honestly, I was lucky in my cyber-attack. He had not hacked my personal computer (albeit, there would be nothing incriminating on there if he had) and the things I said about him behind his back was in fact what I wanted him to know if I had the blunt audacity to tell him directly. Regardless, any violation feels violating. That characteristically sickening feeling was with me, but from it I learned that talking about people behind their backs truly lacked value and that there was no such thing as "a private email."
The latter is a lesson for us to learn now, especially in the corporate world. We have paid it lip-service for years, but I question how many people have had experiences like mine to learn the lesson personally. Any preventative steps created in the wake of this cyber-attack could be an improvement over what little we have now.
