Cyberwar

“Cyberwarfare refers to the use of digital attacks — like computer viruses and hacking — by one country to disrupt the vital computer systems of another, with the aim of creating damage, death and destruction.”

The above explanation of cyberwarfare is the perfect one for not only those who do understand what it already is, but for those who don’t as well. Cyberwar has been around for a very long time and is something that not all internet users are aware of.

We are all familiar with hackers getting into people’s bank accounts and social media accounts. We are also familiar with primary and high school systems blocking games/social media and figuring out a way to get it on the school computer. My remediation this week focuses on this.

Moving away from the light hearted nature, something that might never come to mind are the major hacking schemes.

One of the most famous hacker stories, in 1999, is of a 15 year old boy names James who hacked into the computers of a US department of Defence division and managed to get access to thousands of emails which held usernames of passwords from the US Government as well as military online information. Using this, James was even able to steal a piece of NASA’s software. What James had hacked into was work $1.7 million as it held information of the living space such as the humidity and temperature of space. James was caught later on and only suffered a minor sentence as of his age. In 2008, he committed suicide but in his letter he denied other allegations that were made on him about other major hackers.

Something that I think should be taken away from not only James’ story but reading up about Cyberwar is how real it is for people. Although it is online and just words, numbers and pictures on a screen, it is something that severely affects lives.