HACKED!

  “A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things. “

~ Steve Wozniack 

Hello! If you are reading this article, then I have gained access to your brain to implant my thoughts so that we both could have a cognitive handshake. Wasn’t it that easy for me to access some part of your brain’s attention consciously and at your will? If I, sitting in the comfort of my living room, over a cup of coffee, could grab your conscience with not much effort, how long do you think it would take a computer junkie to hack you with no effort at all?

Psyching! Isn’t it?

We usually spend most of our free time indulging ourselves in social media. Statistics say that users spend an average of 40-50 minutes on Facebook, 20 minutes on Tumblr, 30 minutes on Instagram and 15 minutes on both twitter and Snapchat per day. And then there’s Whatsapp, the official gateway to have a long-lasting friendship. If one is on all these platforms, then it comes to almost 8% of his or her day, excluding the time spent on Whatsapp (Aren’t we online all the time?). Well, 8% of one’s day may as well seem less when compared to other errands that we go through. But, what if we lose 8% of our day for 365 days at a stretch? That comes to around 500 valuable and productive hours that we could have used to keep ourselves fit, learn a language or even develop a new habit.

Hackers are always looking out for something on the net. The moment they spot an interesting thing, they shall not think twice to exploit its vulnerabilities. So if you think you are safe, am afraid that you are not.

Let me justify that with a simple example of Facebook itself. When you sign up for a new account you give all your basic credentials like: Name, DOB, E-mail ID and your Gender. Once you setup your account you also provide them with your city of residence, city of birth, relationship status, sexual preference, employment details, your hobbies, and religious views and so on and so forth. Oh gosh! So much information that even your parents don’t know about? That’s awakening.

More so, they do monitor your entire online life. As in, details about the videos you’ve watched, your friend list, comments you’ve liked, comments you’ve posted, how much time you spend online, location status and what not. Your profile is also up for sale and it’s a non-secretive business model of Facebook. All those information were not voluntarily taken from us, instead it’s us who gave it to them involuntarily on a silver platter. It is hard to keep track of our online and offline activities and maintain our privacy. To strike a balance between the two takes effort.

 

“Hacking is like sex. You get in; you get out; and hope that you didn’t leave something that can be traced back to you.”

Who could forget about the infamous hacks that happened in the past? When a hacking group calling itself “Guardians of Peace” broke into Snapchat’s archived emails which described about their startup ambitions and also loads of personal photos being leaked? Wouldn’t that man who put his blood and soul into it be devastated? Not to mention the abominable iCloud hack too, that went frenzy on the net which gave the world an entrance to the personal lives of celebrities.

A hack might be ephemeral as well, something that infects your system for just a while which is mostly left unnoticed. It’s difficult not to be paranoid about our online activities and be careless about it. It’s left to us to save ourselves from a possible identity theft that may result in us being enslaved by others. The truth is that, it’s not in our hands anymore unless we specifically make an effort to restrict our exercises on cyberspace.

We aren’t ethically hacked; but, aren’t we are psychologically hacked? Every act that we undertake on a social platform is a fitting evidence that we are counter dependent on a virtual world to give us the license to say that we lead a communal life on the Internet. Facebook likes defining one’s popularity, number of comments on a post showing how jobless people are, interminable friend list that actually says how lonely a person is, Instagram posts, tweets and what not. We all know none of it actually matters, but it doesn’t stop us from practicing it every single day. The hack is so intense and unrecognizable that we all do it unconsciously fooling our conscious mind hoping to have an adrenaline rush so that we could feel AWESOME about ourselves. Oh yeah! Such BS!!!!….

All that being said, if given a chance to wipe all your identity on the Internet, would you do it? Well, even if you do, how secure are you anyway?

“In the end, you have nothing in the Cyber World. It’s just a fake identity. “