We are living in a digital era. Whether it be booking a hotel room, ordering some dinner, or even booking a cab-- we're constantly using the internet and inherently constantly generating data. This data is generally stored on the Cloud which is basically a huge data server or data center that you can access online. Also, we use an array of devices to access this data.
Now, for a hacker it's a golden age with so many access points, public IP addresses, constant traffic and tons of data to exploit. Black Hat Hackers are having one hell of a time exploiting vulnerabilities and creating malicious software for the same.
On top of that, cyber attacks are evolving by the date. Hackers are becoming smarter and more creative with their malware and how they bypass virus scans and firewalls still baffle many people.
Do you think AI will make cybersecurity stronger— or make cybercriminals even more dangerous?
Top comments (7)
Hmh, interesting.
This means that they are doing the polar opposite of what devs are doing.
These so called 'hackers' seem like lovely lively folks.
It is quite unfortunate that we corpos are hunting them.
It would be nice if they could share their adventures, tall tales, and maybe we could learn cool things from them.
I would at least be able to hear about an interesting life - which has a real purpose - unlike the cubicle, gray, overzealously HR friendly, Huxley dystopia of this industry, and this platform.
Here on dev.to I regularly asked from devs computer science puzzles.
Devs don't seem to be interested in those, let alone be able to have enough curiosity to solve them.
It is a bit tiresome now.
Especially that if I word my comment in a sassy, fiery way, it gets deleted by autofilters and human mods who lack a sense of humor, but have a bigger than necessary ego.
I'd even say a kind of phase 1 God complex.
Of course it is just phase 1, so sometimes, on some rainy days, devs still get impostor syndrome, reminding them that maybe the Tony Stark memes, EULAs, and hiding behind PR teams don't replace humility, candor and playfulness.
Interesting perspective. I agree that the creativity and unconventional thinking of skilled hackers is fascinating. In fact, I seem to be interested in computer science puzzles. My point though was mainly that attackers are constantly evolving, which means defenders and developers need to keep evolving too. Hopefully we can all stay curious and keep learning (or turn into ethical "hackers" ourselves because at least they're interesting lively folks)
However, I did like your thought on hearing about hackers' adventures and learning cool skills from them. I'll try to post on something related to that.
I meant that the first guy - who weaponized code - did it, because earlier he tried to argue that we need to take things more seriously.
Complacent pampered devs didn't listen, so he did a mild attack.
Of course coward devs called mama, papa, FBI, entire kindergarten was called.
So... I meant that these guys are constantly evolving, because they actually do care.
While developers are constantly devolving, because it is a simple dayjob with 0 responsibility.
Now we hit the point where devs say 'coverage', without even understanding that there's no 'coverage', but there are certain types of it.
Aka:
The actual bad guys are us.
Because we do not like what we do, and we disrespect it, and our end users.
We are salarymen, who'd do literally anything to make our bosses happy.
There are no moral barriers to what a team of devs is capable of.
For example, Facebook directly did studies to make young children susceptible to addiction.
We also harvest and sell our users data, and shield ourselves with legal teams.
We created a digital ecosphere which led to global alienation, misinformation and really deep societal problems.
We are the bad apples.
Real story: Say a hacker got a dating site's db. This dating site was for family men.
Yep. Papa was cheating Mama behind her back.
Ok. Hacker got it, sold it for pennies.
Then of course the dump became news.
What happened?
Nothing. Even more Papas showed up because they saw this nonsense on the news.
It was essentially free ad.
Facebook was hacked, Google was hacked, dumped etc. Nothing really happened.
But... the world itself... jeez... we people are staring into our phones like zombies.
We believe random nonsense, we no longer care about what's happening literally around us.
That wasn't a hack. That was someone's dayjob. It happened slowly, but devs finally did it. They made the world resemble their codebases: buggy, nonsense, deprecated, made up, arbitrary, zero rules, stronger bigger cowboy code wins, boy scouts get eaten alive.
People are literally living triple lives: sad reality, facebook reality, insta reality.
Everything is now like an API doc: Lies. Only lies. No real solutions, just replacing one problem with the other, kicking the can down the road.
Software Engineers are the worst, because they do not own the fallout of their engineering marvels.
At least Soviets covered up chernobyl.
At least BP said something about spilling oil into the gulf was not perfectly nominal.
Meanwhile devs are still shilling here that everything is fine and they are the white knights.
Devs are still in denial phase:
Denial: A defense mechanism that helps cushion the initial blow of loss.
Devs did a Denial of Reality attack.
Black hats can't hurt billions at the same time.
Devs do it regularly on the orders of MBAs, for the price of a used honda civic.
That's what I meant.
I actually agree with most of what you're saying. The black hat always has to be innovative in his craft due to the competitive nature of his environment, whereas many of the software out there today is motivated more by deadlines and KPIs rather than the art of crafting software. I am sure many developers have stopped regarding their work as an art form and now just as "another ticket." The incentives reward shipping, not thinking. I don't think developers are inherently bad, but I do think a lot of them stop questioning why they're building something and only focus on whether it works- that's where a lot of responsibility gets lost.
I think that statement is a bit too positive given the scale of attacks that companies do against end users.
How would we even classify that thing below?
Zero Care Vulnerability?!
Idk, beats me.
'Zero Care Vulnerability' 😂 . I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up describing half the products we use every day. At this point I'm convinced the biggest exploit isn't in the code—it's in the incentive structure.
I really like Dijkstra.
In uni, normie teachers only teach his algos.
They paint him like this bodyless emotion-less highly neutral archangel.
The couldn't be farther from the truth.
That guy... Dijkstra... he roasted us devs, oh my God he was spicy.
You should check him out, he did the biggest roasts on us devs.
Man was like a stand up comedian doing a Roast Night on us.
He was the George Carlin of programming.
Man was completely unhinged even against Naur et al.
Guy just kept doing mic drops in the craziest burn/roast style possible.
Sometimes when I read him... I have to take pauses because I cannot read from laughter.
Best thing about Dijkstra: He did one sentence burns. Sort of like 90s action movie catch phrases.
Example:
Imagine a huge well-cultured scientific, engineering debate.
Adult big professors are discussing testing and verification, validation, making good points, doing progress in the conference.
Dijkstra gets irritated because his coke bottle became empty or something.
D-man grabs mic:
Testing is a very inefficient way of convincing oneself of the correctness of a program.
D-man is a legend.