Remember Mafiaboy?
In 2000, this 15-year-old hacker brought down some of the most heavily visited websites on the net: Amazon, eBay, CNN, Yahoo!. At the time, reports claimed the hack caused a billion dollars’ worth of damage to these companies.
Since that time, cybercrime has become big business, with some reports suggesting it’s on par with or bigger than the illicit drug trade. Identity theft features prominently in this underground frontier, with credit card information and entire identities up for sale by the thousands.
Tonight, CBC is airing Web Warriors, a one-hour documentary with an exclusive look at the world of hackers, and the cyber-sleuths who pursue them. If you miss it on TV, the entire documentary is available on CBC’s site as well.
And on the subject of teenage hackers, we’d like to point you towards Little Brother, the novel for young adults by BoingBoing blog coeditor Cory Doctorow. Little Brother takes place in the not-so-distant future where a group of teens use technology to protest the ever-increasing government surveillance around them. It’s a story that looks at hacking, jamming and surveillance, and offers insight into the privacy vs. security debate…all through the eyes of a 17-year-old.
2 Responses
2:16 pm
The CBC documentary Web Warriors was quite fascinating to watch, but not for the reasons that the producers intended. As someone that makes his living in the identity management and security services field, I was hoping for some insights and balanced reporting on the important issues around privacy and security.
Instead, the breathless narration, old-news stories, exaggerated reports of damages and over-baked security paranoia (did you catch the hammer-and-sickle flag — classic!) made it difficult to take the documentary seriously.
Missing entirely was a discussion about real problems in information security and privacy, things like insider information theft, poor adherence to policies, human error and lack of security awareness in large organizations. And where was the Corporate Information Security Officer to provide an explanation of how modern security controls — intrusion detection, monitoring, audit — are mitigating risk and helping to engender trust?
I suppose if the show creates discussion on these issues it can’t be bad — but shame on Mother Corp. for a blatantly unbalanced and biased report.
Mike
codetechnology.ca
2:57 pm
Hi Mike, and thanks for the very pertinent comments. We’ve certainly seen a lot of reporting about the challenges faced by CIOs and their staff over the past year of so, and you’re right that the bigger threat to identity is likely from INSIDE the organization.
Unfortunately, those stories don’t make sexy consumer television most of the time.
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