Anonymity on the Internet and Defending Yourself

COMMENTARY | We all hear stories on the news about big businesses and websites being hacked and losing profits, infrastructure, or occasionally customer and user information. If you’re like me, these stories probably make you shudder a little bit. But what really makes me shudder about these stories is that more often than not, nobody ever finds out who was doing the hacking, let alone catches them.

The Internet has always been a place of anonymity; this is both why it has been a haven for people reluctant to interact with others in person and a misleading place where people can masquerade as whoever they want. But as more and more of our society becomes rooted in the Internet, the lack of identity of its users becomes downright dangerous.

Recently, news has surfaced about a Java exploit that compromised small amounts of data at a few big businesses, including Facebook, without any serious damage. But this time (although nobody can confirm anything) a few fingers pointed to hackers belonging to the Chinese government. It is impossible to be certain this is the source of the people behind these exploits, but this is a scary possibility. I’m not a big politics person, but one doesn’t have to be especially involved in government to understand the implications if attacks like this are being executed by governments.

If a government, or any individual for that matter, can attack anybody or anything on the Internet in any way it wants without ever being traced or identified, suddenly all attacks have become anonymous. And attacks via the Internet are no small matter either; because the Internet is often wired into utility and infrastructure, attacks via the Internet could cause serious problems for a large number of people, even ones who don’t own a computer. Add anonymity to the equation, and suddenly there is no way to retaliate or eliminate the source of cyber-attacks of any sort; to put it very crudely, as we become more dependent on the Internet, it is as though we are giving hackers the ability to drop virtual bombs on us without any hope of being able to tell who dropped them. The only thing we or anybody can do about attacks of this sort is to try to block them. Fortunately, it seems, everybody is much better at blocking cyber-warfare attempts than they are at executing them; as long as this remains the case, we’ll never need to worry about some unknown government, organization, or hacker in his garage turning off all our streetlights.

Fortunately, there’s plenty we can do to prevent ourselves from feeling vulnerable. While there is no way to know where an attack is coming from, there are plenty of programs that allow companies and individuals to limit the traffic they allow, such as Wireshark, which allows its users to monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic and block or allow whichever portions of this traffic they wish. If anonymous hack attempts continue to be a serious and widespread concern, using programs like Wireshark just for everyday security on many systems may become the most practical solution (and would certainly leave me feeling much safer).