Last week’s news that the personal information of up to 80 million people has been compromised following a cyber attack on Anthem, the second-largest health insurer in the country, while shocking and scary, has an aspect of ho-hum.
To think that crooks could be using that stolen information to create fraudulent credit cards and bank accounts, running up bills that will come to you — or even just knowing where you live — is scary. It’s a violation of your personal space in a way that few things other than being robbed at gunpoint can match.
It unsettles victims, makes them afraid.
But with so many recent announcements of data thefts, the most infamous the recent attack on Sony that is costing the company scores of millions of dollars and has forced its chief executive out of her job, the ho-hum aspect is also there. The Sony attack was ordered by the North Korean government, investigators have concluded, because Sony chose to make and release a comic movie the depicts the assassination of North Korea’s leader.
Other attacks, many still (and perhaps forever) veiled in official secrecy, have been launched by governments around the world against other governments or terrorist groups, who themselves engage in cyber warfare.
But the attacks that violate our personal space, that steal our birth dates and Social Security numbers, they are the ones that make us sit up and take notice.
Indiana University and many local businesses provide health insurance through Anthem. The thieves have gotten into our living rooms and our kids’ bedrooms.
And the worst of it is that there’s very little that many people, probably most, can do, powerless to eject those intruders.
There are measures we all can take to protect our data while managing our own transactions. Don’t use easy-to-crack passwords. Change them often. Make sure your home computer has the latest antivirus software. Educate yourself. The IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (cacr.iu.edu) is a good starting point, with a series of easy-to-digest videos directed at the nonprofessional.
But the hacking of Anthem’s data files? That’s out of our control. We have to depend on the industry protections, much more sophisticated than we’d find on our laptops, to keep us safe behind the wall.
And as Anthem’s announcement shows and as Sony has discovered to its great grief, even huge companies, banks and governments have weaknesses that hackers spend their lives ferreting out. Or they build work-arounds that defeat the newest and toughest-to-scale walls.
This is serious business. “Our first order of business is making sure that we do everything to harden sites and prevent those kinds of attacks from taking place. … But even as we get better, the hackers are going to get better, too,” President Barack Obama said last month in announcing new federal cybersecurity efforts. We can only hope for a permanent fix.