I really hate the movie Diehard. First off, it came out in a time when Bruce Willis was primarily known for smirking his way through roles. He had that crap band, he thought he was an R&B guy, and man, he sucked. Of course, this was the role that got him into Terry Gilliam’s “Twelve Monkeys,” so I cut him a little slack. And Alan Rickman is great in absolutely anything he’s in.
But what I really hate about it is the team of bad guys in general. They have a big crew. Some of them are computer geniuses. They have a ton of military hardware. So they take over a building in a very convoluted plot to make a bunch of money. It seems to me that with the budget they had for people and hardware, they could have invested that money for a while and come out ahead, instead of ending up dead or in jail.
This is also what bugs me about some of the big-time hackers.
As long as we make data available, unstructured or otherwise, it will be a target, and stuff will happen. Some of it is inexcusable (as I mentioned in my last post with regard to SQL injection). In fact, MOST of it is inexcusable, as well as preventable. Naturally, with every new defense comes a new attack. There are a lotta lotta lotta smart people out there who use their powers for evil. If they’re buried behind scrambled IP’s and their own country’s borders, the risk isn’t even that big. If they’re state-sanctioned (like many Chinese hackers are believed to be) then there is ZERO risk. The domestic guys, well, they’re just plain stupid. If they get away with big stuff, they can get caught, and they’re accessible to law enforcement. The Lulz Sec children are a good example.
“Come get us, come get us!”
“Uh, okay.”
Some of these guys get lucky. There are some kiddie hacks that still succeed. The aforementioned SQL injection is a good example. SQL INJECTION. That still burns me. How can you NOT protect against that?
It's a lot easier to be a hacker these days. There are entire desktops and toolsets you can download to get up and going in a hurry.
But a lot of these guys are practically brilliant. The operation that hacked TJ Maxx was run like a small dot-com. It was very organized. People like that, particularly the head guy who’s now rotting in jail, could have devised a whole security company around the IP he gathered for the sake of doing bad stuff.
We’re obviously not motivating people correctly. Perhaps in some of these higher profile cases, Cell Block D will succeed where society has not.