Hacker, Film 2010

The 1995 film Hackers, starring Angelina Jolie was a playful introduction in to what young technologically gifted minds were capable of then. In the film a teenage boy was arrested by the US Secret Service on charges of computer hacking. Hacking has really emerged itself in our headlines as of late, between the ever thriving wiki leaks, who has exposed MasterCard and many US financial shortcomings, or lapses in judgement if you will. Information is still held on many companies including financial giant, Ban of America. The much acclaimed Julian Assange and other spokespeople of wiki leaks claim to have the equivalence of 600,000 pages worth of documents leaking information about bank of America.

We have all heard quite a bit about Wikileaks, and the truth will come out when it does and some will cry, and some will open champagne, but this is not the point. In addition to Wikileaks, Gawker, a major political and popular culture blog was recently hacked into by 4chan which is the largest Enlgish speaking "image-board" website. If you ask me, 4chan is relatively childish and focuses on anime, sex related items, and has a really primitive looking template, but what do they have? Amazing hackers. The hackers had broken into and had been monitoring Gawker's administrative chats and email for 3 weeks prior to pony-trekking into each individual members emails, passwords, ans social networks.

Due to 4chans compelling success in practically shutting Gawker down, due to the fact that they were having a personal feud with each other, other sites have take precautions. LinkdIn disabled any individual passwords of those users who had a password on Gawker in case they were the same to avoid a hack of their system. Cnet news said, "The professional-networking site is taking this action to prevent any of its customers from having their LinkedIn accounts hijacked in the event that they used the same password that they used on any of the Gawker sites." My fear here is that there really is no safeguarding that we can do. If you do not want your ideas scrolled through by a group of kids battling each other in an underground gaming room, simply do not put it online. Unfortunately, none of us can bare the temptation of having others read what we think, then comment, then know what our security question answer is on our online bank account.