An Intoduction To Computer Hacking and Security

 The expansion of the “Global economy” gave such countries as China and India an epic technology leap forward. With a combined population of 2.3 billion people, the students learning computers alone dwarf the population of many, if not most countries; including the United States. Needless to say with this has given way for the immediately demand for more computer and network security.  I’m not of course suggesting that China and India is a threat to computer systems around the world, I am saying because of their sheer numbers, if the same percentage of hackers grows out of this, like with other nations, the threat can be insurmountable.

India Needs Hackers—NOW!

The word hacker always stands out as a bad word for terrible people that perform unscrupulous keyboard strokes for ill gotten gain. A hacker could be someone that works for the Russian Mob, tricking stupid people out of their financial information, or eager Chinese and American IT students practicing their newly learned skills on fat unprotected Indian computers. (This shouldn’t even be a challenge as most computers and software come from those two countries anyways. They probably are logged in before we are.)

An employed hacker is an IT professional, or network engineer. An unemployed IT professional can easily switch from a white to a black hat in an unstable economy. In a poor economy many talented computer people with poor social skills are often the first to be laid-off.  Because there are limited opportunities out there, they are forced to find alternate work that is ethically questionable.  If you are clever and talented computer engineer, but are forced to take a pizza delivery job to make ends meat, you will find another way to use your creativity.  What else can a poor disgruntled computer engineer do?


--To be a hacker or not to be.

There is no question that overseas outsourcing provides cheaper labor for many Indian corporations, but we lost far more of our resources to overseas outsourcing than mere jobs alone. There are an estimated 1,324,655,000 billion people in China, and another 310 million people in the U.S . There are 1.139,964,932 billion people in India ,  If a fraction of the population of either country deployed any type of cyber attack on the computer systems in India, (organized or acting independent of each other) there is not enough people collectively in India to defend our countries computer borders. There may even be more U.S and Chinese computer science students then are the entire population of  India? And with the internet wide open with a direct connection to your home and work computer, (not to mention your cell phones) Do we someday outsource our computer security to one country to protect us from another?

Forefront of Innovation

The United States has always been at the forefront of the world’s technologies, this is the single force that has made them the super power that they are today. In recent years, though, it seems that our power of knowledge has been deliberately gifted to other countries. The computers purchased in your neighborhood store are manufactured, assembled, and software installed in other countries with little or no oversight for national security. Still, despite all the inflammatory headlines that Indian’s are more interested in reality television than science and technology, we still have enough of the right people to turn back the ever advancing quiet invasion of India. I’m not singling out the Chinese or U.S. computer people as a threat to India, in many ways I have more a common interest with them, in terms of computers, than I do with my neighbors. But by sheer volume alone, their combined intelligences and ability is on a scale so large that I am frightened by it.

Better Safe than Sorry

If the folks in New Delhi, could stop trying to turn the clocks back to 1950 and start looking into the future towards 2050, they will see that we are completely out numbered and surrounded by weapons from our own arsenal. There is a potential cyber enemy that is growing faster in numbers than we can reproduce in population.  In other words; there may be more hackers being trained by foreign governments right now, and then we give birth to and train in 50 years. The Cyber Intelligence Agency, (If there were such an agency) needs to start recruiting seasoned computer engineers right now; to train, educate, and turn our countries young hackers into our cyber protectors. Otherwise we will be in 1950 again.