Monday, July 11, 2011

Hackers Seem To Be Ruling The Cyber-World?

Since the very day of its emergence, the breathing planet carries with itself a mountainous history of crimes & ill-doings within humongous forms.
 Along with its way too positive & ultra advantageous services to the human race, the transformation of the Earth to ‘The Global Village’ also produced some notorious villagers who exploited the digitalization of earth in a
detrimental fashion, opening new doors for cyber-crimes, and the world labelled them as ‘Hackers’.

Hacking, which was initially tooled illegally for financial motives,
has nowadays emerged as a tactic for pocketing socio-political gains & a means of protest. Whichever organization or company hackers found popping its head out against the favours of citizenry they give them hell by usurping their servers, robbing their databases & making it public over the internet.
Besides the hackers from various other countries around the cyber-world, hackers from Pakistan & India have bagged ginormous prominence as there exists a fierce competition in both countries.
Hacking is in the air these days, in the past few months hardly a day had passed when a major website was not smacked down by the hackers.
LulzSec logo
Not counting hundreds of others working silently, Lulz Security a.k.a LulzSec & Anonymous are two hacker groups which have become a somebody for the cyber-crime agencies & in the headlines lately. Particularly, publicing of  their telephone hotline for hacking i.e.614-LulzSec or 614-5859732 speaks itself of the hardihood of lulzSec.

Some of the catastrophic defacements of high-profile websites are worth bringing to light;

·      NASA lost its data in a hack attack to a hacker who calls himself Tinkode.
·      Sony Music Japan got hacked by LulzSec.
·      Lockheed Martin, an American global aerospace, defense & advanced technology company revealed that they have been hit by a hack attack.
·      Honda Canada made public that 283,000 of its records have been stolen from their database after some hackers attacked its servers.
·      Fake story about late Tupac Shakur, a rapper/hip hop artist, acclaiming him to be alive was posted to Public Broadcasting Service’s website by LulzSec.
·      Google uncovered hackers’ attack on Gmail.
·      Defense group L-3 disclosed that it was blown by a cyber attack.
·      Sony Pictures database was embezzled & made public by LulzSec.
·      10,000 Iranian government e-mails were robbed by Anonymous.
·      Sony Pictures Russia database was leaked following a hack attack.
·      CIA's public facing website cia.gov  was accliamed to be hacked temporarily by LulzSec, which was restored later.
·      Nintendo, the gaming giant, was hacked by LilzSec.
·      Sega Pass, another gaming monster, confirmed the stealth of 1.29 million customers’ personal data.
·      Fox news’ Twitter account got hacked and the hacker tweeted ‘Obama’s dead’.
·      Serious Organized Crime Agency,SOCA’s website was hacked by LulzSec. The agency itself is tasked with investigating cyber-crimes.
·      Sony’s Play Station Network was hacked & smacked offline for several weeks by LulzSec,resulting into theft of 77 million customers’ usernames, passwords and addresses which, besides attack on its various other websites, provoked 1.3 million dollar loss to Sony.

The aforementioned hack attacks unveil how much hard-coded security these websites carried against viable cyber attacks. There may be hundreds of grands of websites over the internet, vulnerable of being attacked by hackers.

Don’t they, hackers, seem to threaten the digital world by what we can call as Cyber-Terrorism?

Howsoever we transmit our opinionated arguments touching on Hacking, the exceeding attraction for hackers to hack down the whole world should never be underestimated.