UNR
James L’Angelle
University of Nevada, Reno,
Fall 2023
Dr. Paromita Pain,
Professor
29 August 2023
Cybersecurity and the Human Factor
At the beginning of Warriors of the Net, the narrator states;
“For the first time in history, people and machinery are working together.”
The short documentary then forgets people altogether and presents a detailed 13 minute journey through cyberspace; how information is packaged and transmitted, transferred, from its origin to its recipient. Most of the video is straightforward, with some impressive graphics denoting the various packets, materials, pathways, firewalls, and final destinations through the network, at one time referred to as “the world wide web.” What complicates it is when people become part of the ideal universe beyond the real world of trees, oceans, fire and earth.
Communications have come a long way since the aborigines used smoke signals to send packets of information to their kin on the other side of the mountain; but the desire to intercept those signals, or otherwise degrade the message to deceive, subvert or benefit from that was always there, and still is. Using code only confused the intruder, but didn’t stop the system from being somehow manipulated or, in a word, “jammed,” to prevent its receiver from getting the message, or getting a false one in place of the intended one. By the time the internet came along, in all of its advanced stages stemming from the crudest limited early forms, information age jargon replaced “anti-jamming” with “cybersecurity,” but the principle and purpose were still the same.
But what about those early forms? Where and when were the first serious attempts made, some very successful, to bring the network down and why do they reflect on today’s more advanced secure systems that seem to be just as vulnerable as the simple cyberspace smoke signals the aborigines used? Enter the “Human Factor.”
Ironically enough, Warriors of the Net opens with a “Click Here” button featured on the page with a heading “Untitled Document” which is apparently on a Netscape browser window. To get a better understanding of why websites and systems are prime targets of intrusion and disruption, it is related not just to the skill of the intruder but the vulnerability of the system. As browser windows go, Netscape was paleolithic, the film itself was released in 1999. Of course, although it may not be important to point out that the internet has made quantum leaps since then, so has the ability of the intruder to gain unauthorized access to it, due primarily to no one-to-one correspondence between introduction of new systems and associated foolproof cybersecurity.
Internet developers, website designers, server administrators placed security way behind profit. One window became obsolete nearly as fast as it was released, corporate greed invited the enterprising cybercriminal to break into bank accounts, private emails and sensitive government systems. Along came social media. The petty illegal cyberintruder sitting around in his underwear on a sofa in middle America was replaced by sophisticated quasi-legal metropolitan high-rise white-collar advertising vultures out to scrape every piece of information from user accounts, to create a targeted sales environment out to bombard the customer with everything unnecessary but vital for keeping up with the Kardashians. Nowhere in this environment was security given a primary role. Along came the politicians. Campaign organizers borrowed the
advertisers’ technique to generate voter profiles, even as social media sites run by overnight teenage drop-out billionaires sold information up front to the candidates’ committees.
Ironic again was the sudden concern for “privacy” on the internet. Facing new hard-won legislation and stiff fines, reluctant corporations that monopolized the internet and its means of transmission came up with half-apologies like “cookies” notifications to enable advertisers and politicians to legally scrape personal data. Curiously enough, the petty cybercriminal who broke into a network for amusement or perhaps for ransom became a living non-sequitur to the corporate advertiser-political cabal.
The Times-Herald of Port Huron, Michigan published on 18 February 1995 an Associated Press story titled: “Judge keeps hacker in jail.” The cyberintruder was Kevin D. Mitnick, perhaps the forerunner of all the wannabes who followed since Netscape premiered in the mid 1990s. The article noted:
“The man described as the nation’s most wanted computer infiltrator used commandeered cellular phone circuits to raid corporate computer systems and steal information worth more than $1 million, including at least 20,000 credit card numbers.”
Mitnick served several years for his crimes.
He died in July.
References:
Warriors of the Net, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307651/
Williams, Nate, The 5 Reasons Netscape Failed, 06 August 2023,
Kevin Mitnick, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick
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