Hackers have accessed Brazilian government computer systems and helped 107 companies obtain permits that enabled them to fell over £546million ($833m) worth of timbre illegally.
In what has come as a shocking revelation, it appears that hi-tech hackers have played an instrumental role in the illegal deforestation of 1.7million cubic meters of the Amazon rain forest.
According to reports from environmental organization Greenpeace, the hackers were hired by at least 107 different companies to access and alter timber export records held by the Brazilian government. As a result, it’s estimated that an area of forest the size of 780 Olympic swimming pools has been cleared illegally.^
Hacker used to mean someone who pushed technology to do unorthodox things, in the same way that explorer, adventurer, woodsman meant someone who went beyond. Now, it means anyone who uses a computer illegally. The war to define this word is over and the good guys lost.
What this means for all of us is that we have to be aware that computer knowledge, including knowledge of computer security, is commonplace. You can run a powerful UNIX on your desktop computer, as well as many security-related utilities and password smashers. You can even do much of it from a Windows machine, with relatively little knowledge.
In fact, once you’ve mastered the basics of networking, SQL and variable injections, and buffer overflows, you have quite a bit of power. Equipment, operating systems and software are very similar, thanks to the standardization of UNIX and Windows, and the Web causing us all to use similar interfaces and set up networks similarly.
Almost every business needs a web site to serve data, offer clients login privileges, and then check it back in to an internal library that should be kept offline. But as anyone thinking rationally knows, machines that can connect to one other can be used to dominate the other.
For businesses, this is a wake-up call to make computer security part of their daily focus. I would argue that we also need to pay more attention to interface and the cleanliness of our configurations. Busy interfaces distract employees and make them lazy, and sloppy setups from the server room to the locations of files and the logicality of data storage cause people to ignore or miss potential problems.
To computer professionals, I’d say that if you think you’re good, you should realize you’re good in the legal realm as well. I wouldn’t feel well if I had killed acres of rain forest, even if the check was fat. Would you? Especially if you knew it was another 10% of work to get paid legally.