Life is simple. You go to work, did some work, and come back home. Enjoying your life with your family, spouse, and friends, post some photos on Facebook, Instagram to show how happy you are. You have a big role in your working organization and you are fulfilling those duties flawlessly but one day you receive mail and you click on it, nothing happens. That weird, any way you move on.
You don’t have any idea what happened until you hear that your organization has been hacked or the whole IT infrastructure is compromised. You will be amazed how did it happen and people will start to point fingers at you. You took all the precautions to prevent intruders but those intruders went creative and they got you. You have been used as a pawn to catch the big fish.
The biggest weapon in the history
With the tests of nuclear weapons in Bikini Island, people got to know there was something called the hydrogen bomb and it more devastating than a nuclear bomb. After some time, USSR engineers made renewed the record with ‘Tsar Bomba’ which shock the world. Wikipedia says something like this,
This is equivalent to about 1,570 times the combined energy of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 times the combined energy of all the conventional explosives used in World War II
So those bombs were rated as the biggest weapons in history but do they in today’s world. If you detonate those bombs, a lot of people will die in vain in a country. Without killing or harming anybody, a cyber weapon can jeopardize a whole country or industry, or organization with a small click which we already have an ample number of examples. People don’t have to build huge facilities and a huge budget to cover it with high-tech weapons.
You only need a small meeting room and some smart people who know how to hack. Sometimes, it required only some open sources tools and one or two viruses that exploit some vulnerabilities in the operating system to make a cyber weapon that creates a huge impact on society.
Can I detect it?
Today, there are so many virus guards to prevent us from a virus but not all viruses can be detected by those defenders. Sometimes you don’t know how you got hack. That may be you don’t have any idea what you are clicking or tapping. Consider some like Pegasus which was spyware that overtakes your phone which is an essential item for peoples communication. If the third person can see or hear what you are doing, you can’t be imaging what will happen. You don’t know you have been hacked but you are already compromised.
The world has changed and it’s evolving every day. People do research on vulnerabilities, especially devices people are using day today to find a back door. Some of these researchers are helping communities to overcome those issues and protect them from been targeted. Some people do researches to create some harmful attacks on communities expecting some monetary benefits. There are two sides to every coin in every story so we need to be ready every day and double-check for things you are trying to do inside the internet.
Sometimes you think these are done by a bunch of people inside an apartment. No, some are state-sponsored ones. After an attack expert will find pieces of evidence related to one country but as always that country will deny its involvement. After that, it comes to a dead end. So you won’t find many articles about those attacks and their related country details because people don’t have much evidence to make a case of it. You will also end up with people scolding each other but eventually, everybody goes and sleep well that all. We will not have any idea what might be our future in the cyber world and what will happen.
Does the computer only get hacked?
Raising a question like that might be foolish but we need to think about it too. Why? those hacks are not a short term they will affect your whole life span until you decide to be rescued. You will be feed with misinformation, misjudgments, and many more to hack your brain. Your brain can be hacked using social media very easily. Even lot of hacking methods started on social media platforms. After a while, people will be confused about selecting right or wrong in the world why they relied on an app telling them what to do or don’t.
These kinds of hacks, you can’t stop via using anti-virus software or defender in the cyber world. It’s up to you, to be your virus guard rather than letting your guard.
Conclusion
The final question you need to ask. How can we protect from these attacks, computer hacking or mind hacking,
Don’t let your guard down
Until we meet again. Stay positive, test negative