You are being Watched!
1st January 2000. I woke up to a yet another cold morning in the chilly winter of Shimla. Before I could get on with my normal routine, I heard my mother calling out to me, wishing me a happy new year. The words after that still remain crystal clear to me, a statement I can never forget, a statement I believe in-
“ This is the 21st Century now, the world is going to change a lot”
Some ten years later we saw the rise of smartphones in India and the world, a year or two later, E-Commerce had taken over, robots started taking human jobs, artificial intelligence was no longer science fiction and well, the boundaries separating the digital and virtual world started thinning. We developed digital currencies like bitcoin, we got all our friends under one roof via Facebook, we even digitalised our photo albums. In essence, our real-world-self started existing in the virtual world too. We created records of ourselves, well indexed thorough records that mapped our daily lives. Our eating habits, our sexual preferences, our financial records, our persona, everything was recorded. For the first time in earth’s 4.54 billion year’s of existence, a species of 7 billion people were breaking the evolutionary chain.
Darwin suggested that every living creature has the desire to leave behind its genetic material (offspring) as a means to create a legacy that ensures that his physical self’s information is not only preserved but also carried forward by its progeny. But, humans of the 21st century have not only bypassed this but also made this way more efficient. Our information now lives on more than us, we have finally preserved our footprints, we are alive digitally even when we may cease to be in the mortal world. Our information is our answer to God, we have chosen our own destiny as a species.
Now that this is established that our information is way more prestigious than we thought it to be, we must feel the urge to protect and preserve it as ferociously as we can to ensure its survival in the digital space! Certain key possibilities and features must have come to our mind by now like —
- Our information must be private, no foreign entity should be able to access it.
- Our information must be our’s, no other entity may get authorization to use it.
- Our information must be secure, no attack or vulnerabilities may destroy, harm or damage its state.
- Our information must persist, no time limit unless specified may cause its removal/deletion.
- Our information must be available, with proper authorization, it must be sharable and available for use.
Many more bullet points may pop up in our mind regarding our information in the digital world, but these I believe shall be common to most of us. Each and every point mentioned above gives us a certain deterministic feeling that may lead us to the conclusion that we have the right to our own information. This means that no-one may damage, access, delete, retrieve, sell, modify, share or misuse our information without our knowledge and consent. As our lines of visible and invisible diminish, we must realize that with the rising importance of personal data, there is also a rising rate of risk to its security.
Are we being watched?
The most important aspect of privacy is that surveillance and spying of our assets should not exist. In a world of billions of eyes, we can’t possibly have such an egalitarian mindset that makes us believe that no one is watching us. Edward Snowden, the controversial whistleblower stated in his leaks that the US Intelligence Agency, NSA was not only spying but also arresting “presumed threats”, on the basis of their personal records via FISA courts.
This brought into the limelight a whole new face of cyber espionage and cyber spying. The Chinese government has accepted to have had conducted digital-surveillance on a lot of its targets. Most western nations have specialized cells to monitor and conduct such activities. An article by The Hindu published on 28th December 2018 illustrated how Indian Laws can be a threat to the privacy of its citizens online. Link to the article.
There have been numerous such reports and circumstances that illustrate and emphasise the fact that we are being watched. The online hacktivist group Anonymous has raised the question of privacy every now and then. We can check the live status of the cyberwarfare of the world by visiting this site. The threat is not only by any hacker, organisation or government watching us but also the theft of our data and private information. We are not secure, at least not in a traditional definition by which we describe security.
Cyber Secure
So if we are being watched what steps can we take to be secure in this vast and ever-changing cyber world?
As a Computer Science and Engineering student, I have personally divided the idea of personal digital security into certain stages of securing our network and browsing experience. These are certain initial steps that I recommend every individual to take to ensure a higher degree of anonymity and digital security.
The first stage comes when we move towards securing our gateways to our network. We access the internet through routers, LAN connections, wifi etc. On a home network domain, our first and foremost step must be securing this first contact point. For routers, its imperative to check that their firmware is updated, the Universal Plug and Play option turned off, ssh ports shut and every unused service shut off. The best practice is to install custom open firmware on our routers like OpenWRT or DD-WRT to get more configurable options and better security.
The second stage is firewalling. Windows, the most popular operating system for personal computers comes preloaded with its firewall in windows defender. However, we fail to notice its profiles and usually never bother ourselves to check what profile and options are we using. It is recommended to have a special firewall software alongside defender to better configure our online security. For Linux and Mac users, we have iptables and pflist. Additional configurations are required to create a more secure browsing experience.
The third stage is the network anonymity. VPN and Proxies play a very important role in maintaining privacy online. These services can also be used on mobile devices. They provide a safe route for browsing and downloading anything.
The fourth stage is reducing footprint. We must not allow insecure sites to load cookies or send requests to us. We also must not broadcast any critical information on any website. Our personal websites must be protected from the OWASP top 10 list of attacks. The most important method of reducing our footprint is already through maintaining network anonymity. The less they see us, the more we control.
Again these are only certain guidelines that I would recommend everyone to follow as a step in the direction of becoming cyber secure.
As an engineer, I have always believed that every problem presents an opportunity for a solution. As a cybersecurity enthusiast, I, however, believe that the best solution is being prepared for any problem. We are being watched, its a reality, but what’s more important perhaps is to take this as a challenge and a responsibility to not only protect our legacy, our own information but also to restrict its theft and unauthorized usage. With correct practices and small steps, we can surely make a difference in becoming Cyber Secure.
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