Younger Attackers

Not surprisingly, more malware and viruses are being created by children and teenagers. According to an article on PCWorld, an 11-year old Canadian boy was the creator of a piece of malware that was being used to acquire passwords to games. There are easy interfaces being created that allow children and teenagers to learn how to program and engineer these pieces of malware, so of course they're going to take advantage of it. Being so young, they may not have any real malicious intent, but that will be most likely to change as they get older. Children play more and more games that require higher skills, and so they're tempted to try something with a little more "thrill" to impress their friends. Again, we all need to be sure that we are keeping our devices protected from all different types of threats.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2027782/malware-also-the-handiwork-of-children-security-firm-finds.html

The FBI should have hackers?

I was reading through wired.com today, originally I was working on another assignment for a different class, and I saw the article "The FBI Needs Hackers, Not Backdoors". It caught my attention, so I decided to read through it.

The FBI is saying that there should be "mandatory wiretap backdoors" in all of our new technological devices such as smart phones, tablets, etc. According to the article, "For the last few years, the FBI’s been warning that its surveillance capabilities are "going dark," because internet communications technologies — including devices that connect to the internet — are getting too difficult to intercept with current law enforcement tools". However, what the authors' of the article suggested is that the FBI should use the vulnerabilities that are in place already instead of creating new vulnerabilities with a mandatory backdoor. AKA the FBI should get better at hacking - or they should hire hackers - to solve their problem. There's a lot more information contained within the article regarding it, and you can find it here: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/01/wiretap-backdoors/

Happy reading!