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First of all, I want to get this out of the way: I'm not sure what mods will think of this link. It doesn't break any rules, it's already public knowledge and available on YouTube, but it does talk about the NSA. I'm not going to go into my stance on the NSA and what they do; it's a dialogue I've had a lot with all kinds of people, and I'm not interested in having it here because I know it will end up uncomfortable for moderators. So when it comes to discussions, let's rather discuss the implications of having unsecure hardware, and share our tips on how to stay secure.
You might wonder "why should I care about staying secure?" Well, on the simplest of levels – disregarding personal liberties and whatnot – it's about protecting your work. We are all creative people here, and this forum is centered around creating games in RPG Maker software. We've had tons of discussions about copyright and open source and all that, but this is about security on another level. In the following video, it is made clear that your hardware and software is insecure and has a lot of ready-to-be-used exploits built-in. Even if you're an honest citizen who's never done anything worse than stolen a gum as a kid, it still affects you. Unless you're a cryptographer and security specialist, which I'm willing to wager most of us are not.
What does this mean? Well, it means that people with a little bit of that illegal "hacker" knowledge already have ready-made security holes to exploit to steal all your data. I've experimented with some of these on my own equipment (specifically my routers) – which funnily enough would be illegal for me to do to my own devices did I live in most other countries in the world – and the holes are there and actually not that hard to exploit with the right know-how. The stuff you need for it is available "off the shelf", i.e in your average computer store.
But why would they target you specifically? They don't have to; there's a huge chance you'll be caught in a simple dragnet operation at some point where all your important data will be retrieved – like passwords and usernames for websites, and email and instant messages. I'm talking about people who can and will profit off of your data here.
I work with web apps and servers in my daily job, and I can't tell you how many different botnets sniff around every minute of every day. And that's just me seeing the ones that are obvious. These servers run software that is made to be secure, so it'll stop those, but it won't stop the ones who exploit bios backdoors and hardware modifications and implants. But when it comes to a personal computer, we've got a lot more software installed, like Java, Flash Player and all kinds of browser plugins, and other software in general. And most of these contain exploits, and your data will get stolen if you're not careful. And again, you might ask "so what?" Well, I know of two artists who've had their pictures sold on foreign websites that never shared these images online or sent them through email. But they were online with their laptop. I've always known how this happened, but people don't like to believe this. And yes, these artists are pretty tech savvy, way above average. Their computers were secure when it came to malware, viruses and the usual suspects; those were not the problem.
So, with that long introduction gone, here we go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA
This is a talk about the many vulnerabilites in the technology we use daily. I know it's not fun to hear these things, and I know it's depressing, but I think it's important to know what's going on. I'm not even sure there's much us mere "mortals" (in terms of technology) can do to protect ourselves against our data being stolen by criminal third parties with backdoors of these magnitudes in place, but even so: Knowledge is power. And I really like all of you people and felt like sharing this little piece of sad reality with you. And hopefully we can have intelligent discussion about what we can do to protect ourselves in the few ways that we can
You might wonder "why should I care about staying secure?" Well, on the simplest of levels – disregarding personal liberties and whatnot – it's about protecting your work. We are all creative people here, and this forum is centered around creating games in RPG Maker software. We've had tons of discussions about copyright and open source and all that, but this is about security on another level. In the following video, it is made clear that your hardware and software is insecure and has a lot of ready-to-be-used exploits built-in. Even if you're an honest citizen who's never done anything worse than stolen a gum as a kid, it still affects you. Unless you're a cryptographer and security specialist, which I'm willing to wager most of us are not.
What does this mean? Well, it means that people with a little bit of that illegal "hacker" knowledge already have ready-made security holes to exploit to steal all your data. I've experimented with some of these on my own equipment (specifically my routers) – which funnily enough would be illegal for me to do to my own devices did I live in most other countries in the world – and the holes are there and actually not that hard to exploit with the right know-how. The stuff you need for it is available "off the shelf", i.e in your average computer store.
But why would they target you specifically? They don't have to; there's a huge chance you'll be caught in a simple dragnet operation at some point where all your important data will be retrieved – like passwords and usernames for websites, and email and instant messages. I'm talking about people who can and will profit off of your data here.
I work with web apps and servers in my daily job, and I can't tell you how many different botnets sniff around every minute of every day. And that's just me seeing the ones that are obvious. These servers run software that is made to be secure, so it'll stop those, but it won't stop the ones who exploit bios backdoors and hardware modifications and implants. But when it comes to a personal computer, we've got a lot more software installed, like Java, Flash Player and all kinds of browser plugins, and other software in general. And most of these contain exploits, and your data will get stolen if you're not careful. And again, you might ask "so what?" Well, I know of two artists who've had their pictures sold on foreign websites that never shared these images online or sent them through email. But they were online with their laptop. I've always known how this happened, but people don't like to believe this. And yes, these artists are pretty tech savvy, way above average. Their computers were secure when it came to malware, viruses and the usual suspects; those were not the problem.
So, with that long introduction gone, here we go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA
This is a talk about the many vulnerabilites in the technology we use daily. I know it's not fun to hear these things, and I know it's depressing, but I think it's important to know what's going on. I'm not even sure there's much us mere "mortals" (in terms of technology) can do to protect ourselves against our data being stolen by criminal third parties with backdoors of these magnitudes in place, but even so: Knowledge is power. And I really like all of you people and felt like sharing this little piece of sad reality with you. And hopefully we can have intelligent discussion about what we can do to protect ourselves in the few ways that we can
