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metro >> Jews in the digital age
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Viruses, Hacking
And Hoaxes
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Dealing with the evil of the Web.
I
n this column last month I offered a
"top 10 list" of my biggest rants about
technology I received more positive
feedback after that column was
published than for any previous
column. I think this is because
as much as we all have come to
appreciate the wonders of tech-
nology and felt how it's changed
our lives, there are some aspects
of modern technology that dem-
onstrate the evil that exists in
our world.
Internet security has been in
the news a lot lately. Back in 1999,
we were concerned the Y2K bug
would simply break the Internet.
That fear came and went without
much disruption, but today we should all be
anxious about hacking, viruses, malware,
phishing and identity theft.
Unethical abuse of communication is
not new The rabbinic scholar Rabbeinu
Gershom lived 1,000 years ago and was
considered one of the earliest and greatest
scholars of the Ashkenazi Jewish com-
munity. Known as "the Light of the Exile:'
Gershom enacted a number of new rules
for his generation. These new rules, called
"takanot," would only have been created if
there was a reason.
One of his more famous takanot was a
prohibition against reading other people's
mail. Letters back then contained sensitive
business information that could be very
harmful if read by an outsider, so Gershom
legislated against reading other people's
mail as a safeguard against this immoral
practice.
A thousand years later, unethical hack-
ers are breaking into computer networks
to read innocent people's mail. In today's
age, the mail is electronic and no rabbinic
decree or security software is capable of
blocking a determined hacker from intru-
sion into our privacy. Internet hackers are
striking several times a minute around the
world and anyone with an Internet con-
nection is at risk.
Arguably, the most well-known com-
pany of the Digital Age is Google, whose
mantra is "Don't be evil:' If everyone
adopted this precept, we would have no
need for Norton, Kaspersky or McAfee —
all multi-million dollar companies creating
new secure ways to stop hacking, malware,
online identity theft and viruses.
There have been large online hacking
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debacles the past couple years. In late
2013, Target Corp. lost 40 million credit
card numbers to Russian-speaking hack-
ers. After that, hackers broke
into the servers of Home
Depot, Adobe Systems, Chase,
eBay and Anthem. If you do
business with any of these
companies, there was a good
chance your personal data was
violated.
When Hacking Hits
Close To Home
On the smaller scale, email
hacking, which hits closer
to home for many, is when
your private email account is
attacked and thousands of email messages
are sent to everyone in your contact data-
base without your knowledge.
In some cases, the email message might
be a scam, stating that you've been strand-
ed in a remote location far from home and
need some money wired to you. In other
instances, your email might be hacked to
provide access into your Facebook account
or even your online banking account,
causing fraudulent abuse of your finances.
These violations of privacy are becoming
more commonplace.
Sometimes the hacking occurs by tak-
ing advantage of our better judgment. One
woman told me she recently received an
email explaining there was a dangerous
file on her computer that had to be deleted
at once. She was not sure of the valid-
ity of such an odd message, but became
concerned that this file could wipe out
her data — including thousands of digi-
tal photos of her family's vacations. She
went ahead and removed this essential
Windows system file causing her computer
to stop working.
Over the years, I've seen dozens of
people suffer with anxiety after a virus
has corrupted their computer data. This
data loss is more than simply a hassle; it's
a violation of privacy and the theft of one's
possessions.
We've come to regard spam as simply
a nuisance but, in truth, these messages
constitute a virus. Each second of our lives
that we use to delete an email from a Saudi
prince who needs to transfer a few million
dollars into our bank account is time sto-
len from us. Each second of our lives that
we have to decipher whether the "secure"
message from our
bank is legitimate or an
attempt at phishing is more
time stolen. The minutes we take
out of our busy day to visit Snopes.com to
determine whether the urgent email we
received from a friend is a hoax or a legiti-
mate concern is time wasted. These are
unnecessary intrusions.
Someone neglects to sign out of their
email account while in an Internet cafe
out of the country has their email hacked
and unintentionally sends out thousands
of email messages to friends, relatives
and business contacts with an attached
file that contains a virus. Even if only a
handful of recipients open the risky file,
the hassle is significant and can lead to
data loss, hours of time wasted, financial
setback and considerable anxiety. We are
all victims of this pernicious activity on
the Web and, because there's no end in
sight to this unethical abuse, we all must
become more vigilant.
Vigilance Needed
Earlier this month, one of my personal
websites was hacked into by a team in
France that uploaded more than 3 million
spam comments to the website. These
hackers created their own user account
to the website in order to advertise fake
designer sunglasses and menswear. It took
hours for me to recover my website and
return it to normal functionality, not to
mention the unnecessary frustration.
Already this year, my technology com-
pany has had to recover several websites
of Jewish organizations that have been
hacked by anti-Semitic groups. These
hackers replace the websites of synagogues
and Jewish nonprofits with their messages
of hate and violence.
In the Digital Age, we all use the
Internet and we are thus all suscep-
tible to the malicious threats of hackers.
Individuals and businesses are threatened
on a daily basis with computer viruses,
malware and identity theft. Critical files
are held ransom if the business owner
doesn't send a money order to these
nefarious individuals. Email messages can
never be secure enough to be kept private
from those intent on phishing our data.
With all of the benefits of technology,
we live in fear that our passwords aren't
strong enough, our data not backed up
enough and our online financial transac-
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tions not encrypted enough. We continue
to be inundated with spam and scams,
hoaxes and hacks.
So what is the remedy for this dark
side of technology? We should look to the
wisdom of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder
of Facebook. Zuckerberg explains that at
his company they have cultivated a unique
culture and management approach called
the Hacker Way. In fact, "Hacker Way" is
the main street on which Facebook's head-
quarters are located.
"The word 'hacker: he says, "has an
unfairly negative connotation from being
portrayed in the media as people who
break into computers. In reality, hacking
just means building something quickly
or testing the boundaries of what can be
done. Like most things, it can be used for
good or bad, but the vast majority of hack-
ers I've met tend to be idealistic people
who want to have a positive impact on the
world:'
Hacker culture, Zuckerberg claims, is
extremely open and meritocratic. I believe
that in the interest of creating a more ethi-
cal Internet, we must reclaim the idea of
hacking for good.
Rather than falling prey to the evil hack-
ers who seek to take advantage of people
through the Internet, we must invest in
those who look for positive hacking ini-
tiatives, such as such as improving upon
current technologies, systems and applica-
tions as well as using encryption knowl-
edge to develop better security to protect
data from malefactors.
We must remain vigilant to secure our
online data and networks and encour-
age others to do so as well. The time and
money we spend to defend the Internet
from evil is a waste and could be used for
good. As the Internet grows and matures, I
hope morality wins.
❑
Rabbi Jason Miller, the technology expert of
the Detroit Jewish News, is a local educator,
blogger and tech entrepreneur. He is presi-
dent of Access Computer Technology in West
Bloomfield. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiJason.
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