The reality of the dangerously porous world we live in keeps getting grimmer as yet another cyber hacking scandal hits the headlines. The latest episode involves a bug — succinctly nicknamed Heartbleed — that experts say has been lurking within the internet for almost two years and, fortunately, was discovered by a Google researcher. The threat of cyber hacking has been an inevitable fallout since the time internet took over our lives. For every moment of technological triumph the world wide web allows us to experience, there is the undeniable prospect that someone somewhere is watching us in the eternal ether. Paradoxically, the advance of technology is burdened with its own nemesis as a constant companion, a fact so shockingly benchmarked by the staggering scale of Wikileaks. The issue of just how secure we are as individuals finds a disturbing counterpoint in this context because our relationship with the internet today is defined more by intimacy than caution, and this state of abandon often extracts a heavy price from us.
Given the lack of a panacea to cure the problems of technology, it is logical to conclude that the only way we can control our relationship with it is through discipline. In the wake of Heartbleed, cyber security experts worldwide are urging every member of the internet community to go back to the basics by observing some nonnegotiable rules. They include changing passwords as frequently as possible, building strong passwords rather than knee-jerk combinations, updating web software, installing the best anti-virus software, to name a few.
In our overwhelming dependance on the internet, we often forget a crucial truth — the onus of our safety, ironically, is not with the host of cyber soldiers technology has drafted into its service over the decades; it is on us. As we chat, shop, connect, post pictures and pretty much do everything else on the internet in the name of living, it would be prudent to remember that this great medium we love so much is essentially nondiscriminatory and non-caring, qualities we need not emulate when interacting with it.
