This year was a big one for news about threats to our cybersecurity and
online privacy.
Some of the major stories included big data breaches – such as Ashley
Madison, TalkTalk and VTech, plus many more in between – while the political
debate over encryption backdoors reached new levels of intensity after the
terrorist attacks in Paris.
Serious security vulnerabilities in commercial products, like the Stagefright
and OCtoRuTA bugs in Android, and the FREAK and LOGJAM problems in TLS/SSL, also
raised widespread concerns.
Ransomware, the punch-in-the-face malware that scrambles your files and then
demands money to buy the decryption key back from the crooks, was in the news
all year long – more and more victims, caught without backup, ended up with
little choice but to pay the ransom.
And, unsurprisingly, worries about ever-encroaching surveillance grabbed
headlines throughout 2015.
But as we look back at the year gone by, we thought we’d highlight some of
the oddball stories that may have slipped through the cracks.
Despite their quirkiness, these stories remind us how important cybersecurity
and online privacy have become in all areas of our lives.
Here are some of the weirder stories we’ve covered this year.
Man seeking hacker for hire on Craigslist gets busted when cop
answers his ad.
A Pennsylvania man attempted to use Craigslist to hire a hacker to wipe out
his court records and $16,000 in fines he owed. Now Zachary J. Landis, 27, is
facing up to four years in jail after an undercover cop answered the posting and
Landis requested proof the “hacker” could do the job by wiping out some of his
fines.
Maybe Landis would have been better off using an anonymous hacker-for-hire
service.
Earlier this year, we noted the emergence of a hacker-for-hire site called
Hackers List that acts as a job board for possibly illegal activity. Hackers
List’s founder, a US Army veteran and cybersecurity “consultant” named Charles
Tendell, claims his service doesn’t permit illegal activity.
It’s hard to imagine people using the site for legitimate purposes, but
anyone who does go in search of hacking services should beware that hiring a
hacker to do something illegal is at least as bad in the eyes of the law as
doing the hacking yourself.
UK police were worried about apocalyptic Star Trek and X-Files
fans.
Investigative journalist Dr. David Clarke published a book earlier this year
about UFOs revealing that the UK’s Metropolitan Police were worried about
violent, apocalyptic science fiction fans.
Clarke uncovered a memo written by the Metropolitan Police in the 1990s
warning that fans of the X-Files, Star Trek and other sci-fi shows might commit
acts of violence in the run-up to the new millennium.
There’s no evidence that the Metropolitan Police acted on the scaremongering
memo, but it looks even sillier now, with the enormous popularity of the new
Star Wars flick showing that millions upon millions of people love science
fiction without posing any threat to society.
Given how much power law enforcement and governments have today to keep track
of our activities – including our comings and goings in the real world, and
online – we might want to ask: what other kinds of innocuous behavior will
authorities start fretting about next?
Criminals still don’t understand how social media works.
We saw a lot of stories this year about crooks incriminating themselves with
social media posts confessing their illegal activities, and fugitives giving
away their location with geolocation on their devices, selfies and social
posts.
Even self-described “hackers” can over-estimate their own cleverness while
under-estimating law enforcement, such as the serial SWATter who said hackers
can’t be caught in taunting voicemail messages, but was arrested a few weeks
later.
There’s also the wacky story about a woman who fled the scene of an accident
only to have her own car report her to the cops.
And there’s the case of Ross Ulbricht, a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts, sentenced
to life in prison for running the underground website Silk Road, who was busted
at least in part because of information left behind in a reply to an online post
that he thought he’d deleted.
There’s an important lesson here for law-abiding citizens too – be very
cautious about what you share on social media and elsewhere, such as location
data. You never know how it could be used against you.
The rise of robots is scary to people, who sometimes react
violently.
Robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly, are becoming more
useful in many areas of our lives – and also more threatening.
As robots learn how to carry on discombobulated conversations and to write
articles nearly as well as humans can, a number of leading tech gurus and
scientists have begun warning that our very existence could one day be
threatened by the rise of AI.
In this context, we saw several weird stories this year about people
allegedly committing violence against robots, such as the “murder” of a
hitchhiking robot, and a drunken attack on a joke-telling, rapping robot named
Pepper.
Similarly, there was the story of a Colorado man who was arrested for popping
caps into his computer for freaking him out with Blue Screens of Death. (You’ve
never done such a thing. But you’ve wanted to!)
And after police in Switzerland seized a robot for buying drugs on the Dark
Web, it’s starting to look like our public policies and legal systems are not
quite ready to handle the rise of AI.
Although robots have enormous potential to help humans, we’re also
increasingly worried about drones and talking dolls invading our privacy and
harming our way of life.
Now it’s your turn.
Those are some of the stories that caught our attention this year.
What are you seeing out there? What are your thoughts on the weirdly
worrisome security stories of 2015?
Let us know in the comments below.
Follow @NakedSecurity
Follow @JohnZorabedian
Image of girl in 2015 glasses taking selfie courtesy of
Shutterstock.com.
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