Hackers? Do us a favour

Is it right to punish hackers for exposing security flaws which put our personal details at risk?
 
Today a British teenager was arrested over the recent spate of hacking which has seen the likes of the NHS, the CIA and a range of companies like Sony and Nintendo's websites hacked open.

The arrest, co-ordinated by Essex Police and the FBI, saw a 19-year-old who is the supposed ringleader of notorious internet hacking group LulzSec taken into custody.

Yes, he broke the law. But is it fair to punish someone for exposing the security flaws which could have put us all at risk?

Hacking, you see, has become all the rage. Everybody who's anybody (read: a bedroom shut-in nobody) has been hacking into bigwigs' websites for a laugh, leaving messages inside their 'secure' servers and boasting on Twitter about how they could get access to all these companies' personal details. Aka, your personal details.

These are not simple little Norton firewalls. These are, in some cases, multi-million pound security software systems which have been compromised by groups of internet anarchists seemingly intent on watching the world burn, one web hack at a time.

LulzSec's now-notorious logo

But have hackers, like the infamous 'LulzSec' and 'Anonymous' groups, become demonised unfairly? After all, these sites are supposed to be secure websites housing, in some cases, very sensitive data and have been hacked open as if it were as easy as shouting 'open sesame' at the NHS database.

Yes, some of the hacking has been silliness. The news site PBS posted a story stating that legendary, deceased rapper Tupac Shakur was actually alive and living in New Zealand. This was obviously useless, borderline dangerous joking by hackers at the expense of PBS.

But a lot of the hacks have actually served a beneficial purpose - they have exposed serious, some might say criminal, flaws in the supposedly secure systems of these websites.

Hacking group LulzSec allegedly left this message inside the NHS database which holds the names, addresses and other personal details of millions of people:

"While you aren't considered an enemy - your work is of course brilliant - we did stumble upon several of your admin passwords".

"We mean you no harm and only want to help you fix your tech issues".

If these apparently harmless hackers can hack in so easily, though, what's to stop a more malicious group from gaining access to the details of anyone on that NHS database?

Similarly, the group has highlighted serious flaws in the security of the government's 2011 census database; which surely holds enough information about each and every one of us to put all of us at risk of identity theft.

Whilst I would never condone what these hackers have done - after all, Anonymous put the PlayStation Network down for a month, at the estimated cost of some $100million to Sony - which could have repercussions for their employees.

And whatever their stated intentions, we should always be wary of any group which is openly admitting to accessing databases of personal information. It only takes one rogue, less noble member of LulzSec to sell on these personal details to someone unscrupulous to put everyone at risk.

But these hackers have shown us just how fragile these 'secure' databases really are. Sony held PS3 users' credit card details in its records, yet secured them so poorly that some bedroom-dwelling teen might have made off with the lot. Government bodies like the NHS, too, must be secure enough to stop any intrusion.

If they are going to force us to hand over our personal information, the least they could do is look after it properly.

Hacking is obviously illegal, and the arrest made today shows how seriously the authorities are taking it. But some blame must lay at the companies' cyber-doors.

If this spate of web attacks results in more secure databases for all our personal info, they may just have done us all a favour.

I'm not trying to argue that this teenage hacker is some modern day martyr. But this is one area in which the law clashes with ethics - we must all question whether it is really right to punish him when his actions may have helped get us all better protected.

Has PSN's downtime ruined the PS3?

At some point last week, PSN finally came back online after 22 days of PS3 gamers being left in the cold, offline wilderness.

It's back, but it's still a bit broken. Playstation Store is closed. The servers seem a bit jumpy, and my PlayStation Android app doesn't really, er, work.

Sony have promised that when PSN is fully functioning, owners can choose two of five free games to make up for that rather unfortunate matter of everyone's credit card details now sitting on the hard drive of some dark room dwelling borderline sociopath somewhere in Ohio.

On top of that, Sony PS President Kaz Hirai and his fellow executives apologised publically with a bow; a deeply significant gesture in Japan's culture of humility and integrity.

Too little, too late? Well, it might be. But we can't even get our free games yet, because the Store is still down.

The whole sorry episode has seen Sony shambling through problems like these. It's no wonder that PS3 trade-ins have increased an astonishing 200% since PSN went down, according to EDGE magazine, based on official retail figures.

PS3 had been having a good year until last month. Between exclusives like Gran Turismo 5, LittleBigPlanet 2 and the Uncharted 3 announcement, the PS3 was hot property. It even threatened to topple the Xbox 360's dominance, often overtaking it in sales.

They say a car is only as fast as its driver, though. Give Vettel a Red Bull F1 car, you get victory. Give me a Red Bull F1 car, and I'll give you an explosive, bloody mess, not a world championship.

Well, Sony ain't Vettel. They've driven the PS3 machine from a stable, advantageous position into the dirt track, and it may take a lot more than a couple of hand-outs of old games (LittleBigPlanet 1? Really?) to restore gamers' faith.

At the end of the day, we're all grown ups here. We don't hold certain companies or consoles in some beloved, quasi-weird position of love. We just want to game. It's understandable that many have probably defected to Microsoft's Xbox, where the online is always on and the credit card details always un-leaked.

To win over the gaming crowd again, Sony need to do something special - and I'm not sure they have it in them, any more than gamers have it in them to trust the company again.

E3, the annual games convention usually bursting with announcements, is only a couple of weeks away - and for PS3, it could be do or die.

Can we trust the internet with a credit card?

If a supposedly secure, world-wide service can be hacked, should we really be shopping online at all?


Somebody 'may' have got hold of 70 million peoples' credit card details this week, according to Sony.

Yes, the Playstation Network (PSN), which allows millions of PS3 and PSP owners to play games online has been hacked, causing the service to be suspended for over a week, but more worryingly, for the card numbers, date of birth, email and physical addresses of all of its users to potentially be compromised.

If PSN can be hacked, and card details (like mine) obtained, then what about other websites? Amazon is completely secure. It displays that little gold padlock in the corner when you buy something. So does Paypal, and eBay, and Play.com. I've used all these sites and never have I received a phone call from my bank asking why I've started bulk buying iPods and Bulgarian porn. But the risk remains.

I must stress that these sites are secure, and I have heard no reports of them being hacked. But it could happen, theoretically. If PSN, a 70-million user service from a world-recognised corporation, can be hacked open, why not one of these sites? If there is even a slight risk, why shop online at all?

Well, some don't. And they aren't all old fogeys who don't know what an internet is. My 18-year-old brother refuses to shop online because he doesn't trust a computer to feed his money digits down a webpipe to some company in the hope he'll receive something in the post four days later. There are plenty who feel the same way.

But we've come a long way since the early days of the internet. The fact is, there is virtually no risk at all in buying from a reputable, recognised website. The level of security is beyond military standard. People's lives are one thing, but if there is money involved, the security goes up to another level.

Yes, PSN was supposed to be that secure, and it might have been compromised. That's a huge error on Sony's part. But games console networks are in their infancy. The Playstation 2 didn't have any sort of network, and the PS3 has only had one for five years. Now that it has happened, future games consoles will be doubly or triply secure.

Sites like eBay and Amazon have years of security experience behind them. If we can't trust them now, we probably never can.

So, can we trust them now? Well, it's up to individuals to determine if it's worth that risk. In my eyes, I take a larger risk of having my card details stolen every time I leave the house than I do when I shop online. Shopping on Amazon is the equivalent of using the cash machine with an army of fifty bodyguards by your side. Out on the street, I'm a scrawny white bloke who couldn't fight a paper receipt, let alone a paper bag or a mugger.

But it is up to the companies who run these websites to persuade people how safe they really are, though. Sony has a lot of damage control to do, and if peoples' accounts do start emptying, it could set web shopping trust back years.

If Sony is the weak link that ruins internet shopping for the rest of us, then it will have a lot more to worry about than the Playstation Network.

Internet shopping should be treated with a heavy dose of caution, but it's as safe as anything else in life: 99%. Nothing can ever be totally safe.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to wait for a possible phone call about some Bulgarian videos.