WHAT IS IT?

 

If you own a popular device that connects to the Internet, someone, somewhere, is trying to track it, break it, or steal it.

The issue is complexity. Complexity also means vulnerability. The more complex a device becomes, the more difficult and expensive it is to protect. To keep smartphones and other high-tech devices affordable, their manufacturers do the absolute minimum to protect them from hackers and other malicious individuals.

Companies do their best to minimize or hide vulnerabilities, but bulletproof software and hardware are for military applications where price is no object. For consumer products, engineers are limited by cost. Budget always has the final say, and most Internet-capable devices hit the market accompanied by prayers that hackers never notice the back doors that have been left in place.

It’s the Wild West on the Internet, complete with folks who will shoot you just to watch you die. The black hat community (hackers who specialize in network intrusion and computer viruses) will target anything that becomes popular, probe it for weaknesses, and destroy it, if possible. They don’t do this because they’re bastards; some black hats claim to be performing a service, arguing that if they discover and exploit a weakness, it teaches The Man a lesson about security. Most of us, noticing a serious flaw in a security setup, would write a letter. Black hats figure writing letters is for wimps. A much more effective way to point out a security flaw, they feel, is to write a virus that brings down air traffic control or fries a nuclear power plant. It sounds totally reasonable if you’re a douche.

Hackers aren’t the only people you need to worry about. Anything you own that connects to the Internet, contains a GPS, or otherwise receives a signal can be tracked. Even without all the RFID tags in our clothes, without the frequent-shopper cards and IP logging and consumer profiling, we walk around like digital rabbits leaving a trail of little electronic poops. Anyone with the proper tools can follow us.