The Future of Information And Data Security: Everything Can Be Hacked

The Problem

If it is digital or on an electronic device, that can be remotely or wirelessly or through wires be accessed, it can be accessed by someone you don't want to have access to it. Like it or not, that is the future of information and data security, pertaining to any kind of information or data, in any form or way digitised or electronically stored. And if you don't want your information or data, private, personal or professional, to be "hackable", you will have to consider a very huge cost; going back to the age before digital or computers or even electricity. Basically, it means, going back to the stone age, by turning hermit and disappearing into the Himalayas.

The hottest topic, when it comes to IT, over the past few years and the next few decades, is about IT Security or Cyber Security, and for good reason. The conversation is not about what information can be accessed, from whom and from where, but rather, it is about what can be done with that information, if it is accessed by people who should be accessing it.

IT is a subject for humanity, that has evolved faster than any other in human history, and will continue to evolve as a subject, more and faster, than anything else in the coming decades. We are nowhere near the zenith of IT yet, but we are racing towards that zenith to the extent that everything we know about IT today, will be obsolete by 2030. Along with this evolution, one may fairly expect, security for the "information" in IT which means Information Technology, too will evolve, and certainly, that it will. Here lies the ironic or paradoxical problem. IT security or Cyber security is about technical methods, to block or prevent access to entities not privy to or authorised for access to the information by those who own or control that information. It is not like protecting gold bars behind physically engineered wall structures. If a right minded IT practitioner or expert can develop a method to protect information, a malicious IT practitioner or expert can develop a method to circumvent or overcome the methods of the right minded IT practitioner or expert. It is a game of perpetual one-upsmanship. 

The trouble with methods, especially in the Age of Access, is that they can be learnt by anyone, with basic aptitudes for the subject matters to do with those methodologies. This can include persons of malicious character, including criminals and terrorists.

The Implications

As all aspects of human life and existence increasingly become virtual, so too over time, will crime, warfare and terrorism.

Take for example, instructions in autonomous vehicles or aerial drones being compromised and manipulated, could lead to vehicles and drones crashing into buildings, causing not just material damaging, but human casualties.

As physical crime becomes increasingly more difficult with surveillance and increased police presence around the world, criminals will turn to online means to take your wealth out of your bank accounts, in ways which to them would be easier, when it comes to covering their "footprints", so as to be able to get away with the crime.

And as much as professionals in the field of tech security can improve their capabilities, just as criminals of the past improved their capabilities along with the evolution of police departments around the world, the future criminals upgrade their "skills".

As the space between information and machines continues to narrow, your behaviours, habits, relationships and movements can increasingly be tracked by businesses, governments and unsavoury individuals. It really is the latter that you'd need to worry about.

Your identity can be stolen, you can have evidence against you planted on your devices for something you would never do, your accounts can be abused without the knowledge of your bank let alone yourself, to launder money and the list of examples can keep going on and on, about the possible abuses ahead in the future, with hacking.

The Solution

There isn't an adequate solution to prevent hacking in sight quite very honestly, because every time an institution, a university or a corporation will develop a method or teach a method for IT professionals, end-users or whoever else to supposedly better safeguard systems, devices, networks and information, somebody will create a loophole if there isn't one already, to beat that method. This is likely to be a perpetual status quo for as far as we can currently foresee, objectively. However, vigilance can minimise the threat to some extent anyway. Always watch the inventory of your data and information for irregularities (of any kind, on a day to day basis), and you will always need well-trained IT experts and diligent accountants (when it comes to ledgers and financial databases or documents) to help with that, at least in the corporate or organisational context.

On the personal front, what you can do, even if little, is to minimise communication, or storage, of information online or over the web, that you would not want strangers to "eavesdrop" upon. For example, you are frequenting a favourite restaurant, you may want to avoid boasting about it in Facebook status updates. If you don't want your image abused, which somehow with tech, is always going to be possible in time, flattering or unflattering photographs are best not kept on handheld devices or shared on social networks. As much as cracking passwords is child's play according to plenty of IT Professionals who tell me so, and as much as they seem redundant, do take them seriously, make sure they are complicated, not telling about you and hard to guess.Sounds pretty rudimentary, and it is a lot more rudimentary than it sounds, but it is better to take some measure than none at all. It is the best we can do, but we should do it. 

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing.