Hacking Humans
I have always been afaid of hackers watching me or listening to me while I am on line. I have always felt that my privacy while I am on line is compromised. The main reason I feel this way is because technology is not my forte by any stretch of the imagination. That means that there are millions of “tech geeks” out there who might want to know something about me that I wouldn’t want them to know.This is one of the biggest reasons I believe that I have never pusued learinng about technology and how to use it. I am computer illiterate. Well not ecactly. I can say that I can navigate quite well thruogh the internet and I am able to use microsoft office products with few set backs. So I am better in technology than I think. This never was able to ease my mind about hacking and identity theft while on line.
I have never purchased anything on line except a criminal reference check for placement nor have I ever paid a bill on line, I have never felt comfortable with on line banking either. This is because I know that anything I put on the internet will be placed in a public forum. Although I am certain most on line services offer some kind of security, I am still not 100% convinced that identity theft couldn’t happen to me. Therefore, feeling vulnerable and unarmed with more education on internet security, I avoid using convenient internet services that could potentially save me time and money for fear of “being watched”.
The article Hacking Humans written by Jason Nolan and Michelle Levesque offers some credibility to my apprehensions about using on line services that require disclosing personal information. Nolan and Levesque illustrate the point that the internet or world wide web is a public forum that contains in it a vast amount of information from the past. Any time someone logs on to the Internet, they leave a bit of information, a slight change in the on line environment that can be traced back to the person. They describe the Internet as an information grave yard where hackers can access information most easily by using search engines. The authors also describe what a social hacker is.
A social hacker is someone who listens to other people’s conversations in order to gain some kind of knowledge about them. The hacker may also engage in conversaton with the victim and ask for more personal information. While doing the Google lab I learned how to hack into some of Ryerson University’s files. Some of these files included people’s names and their weight. Some may have even contained more personal information about someone. The bottom line is be careful and don’t put anything on line you don’t want traced back to you.
Reads: 566 | Today: 2 | Last: 07.09.2010 - 08:49
