Tech Is Not Safe

Let's start off this short thought by saying that I am not a security expert and this is not about security per-se. I've witnessed or have been victim of enough data leaks in my life that I know my data is out there somewhere. I am thankful that I have been aware of personal security measures one can take for a while. Being passionate about tech is helpful, you can have a decent grasp of how the sausage is made. What I stumble upon the most is the survival bias of people around me.

I tried and often successfully convinced people in my life to change their security measures, leaks happen so often that we're at a point where very few companies have not been subject of one. It is pretty easy to convince yourself once you list all very well known companies who suffered a hack or a massive data leak. Your data is not safe and tech in general is not safe. The simple reason being that tech is built my people, operated by people and people are flawed. So while you can have the greatest system in place, it just takes one distracted individual for things to break.

I was thinking about this because of the massive nation-wide outage from various phone providers. First thing I told my wife this morning was, this is a cyber attack or someone testing (successfully) the boundaries of the system. If you've read "This is How They Tell Me the World Ends" you'll understand why this was my first thought. I'll be honest though, this is not some brilliant revelation I had and I'm pretty confident many others thought about this being a malicious event rather than an accident. My feeling was confirmed a bit later in the day with rumors about the FBI investigating this incident. I doubt we'll find out the real cause of this event and probably a book 5 years from now will tell us how things went.

Reading the book made it very clear that not all systems are built with the same "high" security standards and in this day an age, given how connected we are, it is not surprising that even from across the world someone could debilitate a system. Vulnerabilities are everywhere and have been exploited for the longest time. The concerning part is the dormant ones that have not yet being exploited, just there waiting to be leveraged.

All of this rambling to say that you should not trust a system with your data and you should value your privacy. There are better educated people than me that can convince you but between the many leaks, investigative journalism, reports, and security breaches it is hard to feel safe with any piece of tech.

Thoughts

I'm a bit all over the place with my thoughts today and clearly didn't spend much time trying to articulate them. But this nation-wide incident made me think about security in general and everything I learned about cyber attacks and invisible wars. I'm a little sad when people sacrifice security for a little convenience. Take Clear at the airport for example, so you want me to trust a third party with my biometrics and believe they are safe? The government already has them anyway but that doesn't mean I should give them away like candy. Stay safe out there!