Where Have All The Good Techs Gone?

Strange title? Read on fellow traveler, read on. Recently, there have been a few 'hacking' attacks against a whole range of companies, all across the private and government sectors. First we start off this gauntlet of breaches with George 'GeoHot' Hotz and his cracking of the Playstation 3 home console. Now, previously, hacking into cell phones was deemed legal but home gaming consoles of any kind still remain a nice big grey area that large companies, like Sony or Microsoft can and will exploit for every penny they can. I'll let you all do the research, but the short of it is Sony put this kid's head on a pike at the top of their headquarters.

Next, we jump right into the large and very public hacking of Sony's website and servers, in what seemed a response to the handling of the GeoHot case. The group Anonymous was blamed, and the responsibility war is till going back and forth, more than a month after the attacks. These attacks, for those of you that either didn't care or were living without any internet connectivity, managed to pry thousands of users' personal and sensitive information, including user names, passwords, and very possibly credit card data, which Sony denies the latter. Regardless of what was taken, this showed how vulnerable this network really was, if a relatively small group of hackers could fairly easily slip in and have their way with things. The result was Sony's PSN being down for almost a month, and countless thousands if not millions of dollars in lost revenue. About the same time, another one of Sony's online systems was brought down after some intrusions, their SOE systems that ran such titles as EverQuest and their newly popular Realm for all ages of users. This was a huge breach in the end and not all of the details of what was really taken have been dished out.

Soon after, we jump right into the 50 days of hack-attacks from the newly formed group calling themselves LulzSec. These mighty hackers penetrated everything they could get their code-hooks into, ranging from BioWare, a game development powerhouse, right on up to the CIA and the U.S. Senate. They went everywhere their little fingers could take them, and exposed weaknesses of not only websites, but also at times the organizations behind them and how inept or corrupt they might be. They had no holds barred on this one, unlike Anonymous. They broke in and took what they could, plundering and pillaging vast amounts of internet real estate. And, much like a modern-day Robin Hood and Merry Men they gave all of this back to the community in the form of stolen accounts information about major corruption. They have announced that they are now bored of themselves, and they are finished also having met their 50 day goal. That was more of a whirlwind let loose on the web, that quickly blew itself out but still having left a huge swath of destruction in it's digital wake.

So, I go back to the title now- where have all the good techs gone? Are they sleeping? These breaches were, in my opinion, almost begged for by some of these companies. While I know that a Google search of me can find a bunch of data that wasn't easily accessible 12 years ago, there are some things that you can't find. Passwords, credit card data, previous legal proceedings, etc. This data is supposed to be securely locked away in a database somewhere, with only very specific groups of people having access to it. Standing in front of the physical server where my life is stored are supposed to be competent server administrators and security specialists. That does not seem to be the case anymore. Are large companies not putting money into this area, and just resting on the notion of 'set it and forget it'? While I may not completely agree with the method, I do agree that these attacks have shown two things here- 1, that as a company executive I have to take more responsibility and pay more attention into all things related to my technology; and 2, as the consumer I am now more aware that those companies are not doing their proper diligence in securing my amazingly private data and that I need to be a little more careful on what I give out.

Agree or not, the issue of data security needs to be addressed on a wide-scale level. Now, where is my aluminum foil hat...