All this talk about russian hackers and gaping vulnerabilities reminds me of the movie Hackers. Hack the planet man! Seriously, we can hack the school's sprinkler system and find the pool on the roof.
Why are people so mystified with hacking? Take the time to look into it a bit and you'll find it's not as exciting and glamorous as everyone makes it out to be. A movie about a real hacker would be boring as hell.
And for the most part, hacking is all automated these days. It's not like most hackers sit there and take the time targeting a specific website and try to gain access to it using a plethora of ingenious methods. I mean it happens, but in most cases, it's just a bunch of script kiddies who run a script in the background on autopilot that tests massive amounts of sites against a database of vulnerabilities and then dings like the microwave when it finds something.
It's not exactly brain science these days and if corporate America would get their heads out of their asses and stop rushing products to market to maximize profits on something they threw together haphazardly, you wouldn't create glaring opportunities for these half-assed hackers to exploit. This is not to say that I agree with hacking, because I don't. But we do live in a nation where it's become socially acceptable to steal music and movies online, so I can understand why they might think what they do is alright. It certainly isn't for the reasons it once was, so they have to have some excuse.
But really the hacker has gone the way of the rest of the world... They've become consumers, addicted to mass production, fast food and mindless entertainment. Perhaps literally and figuratively. Theres really no purity in anything these days.
The upside to being hacked is that you can claim they destroyed proprietary software worth millions like the big corporations do and write that off on your taxes next year!
Uncle Sam feels your loss.
No but seriously, I highly recommend backing up your data regularly and storing it off-site. Can't stress that enough.
