I had my worst flight experience back in October 2010. That experience was with United Airlines. I was visiting family for a month over in Australia, with a layover in San Francisco for 4 hours.
The trip from Vancouver to San Francisco was average, there wasn’t any food and the flight attendants almost never came by, but the flight was short and it was only around dinner time, not an issue for me at all.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how successful exploitation and compromise of sensitive information has evolved over the years.
Sure social engineering has been around a long time, Kevin Mitnick was a master of it. But a lot of the damage done and information stolen didn’t even require social engineering. Even just a few years ago, amateur hackers and skiddies (script kiddies) could gain access to thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of valid credit card information belonging to very real people. SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities were (and some still are) commonplace among many international governments and companies. Teenagers could sit at home, read a simple tutorial on SQL injection, gain access to an unbelievable amount of sensitive information, deface websites, sell this information underground, and cause businesses plenty of headaches. Only after years of news headlines, great sites for education on vulnerabilities, best practices, and even many discussions on whether companies should be held liable for massive security breaches have companies begun to really take security seriously.
Yesterday, Aaron Swartz commited suicide. Unlike the many other blog posts on the internet today and yesterday, I never knew Aaron. I never worked with him, emailed him, or read his blog posts.
In fact, the only reason I knew of Aaron before his suicide, was through his anti-SOPA/PIPA website, demandprogress.org. I don’t have any memories of Aaron to share, no stories about how his minimalism approach to code inspired me, I don’t even care that he co-created Reddit, or that he co-authored the original RSS spec. However, at one point in both our lives, we were fighting for the same cause, to bring awareness in stopping SOPA.