To start let's look into what is the intentions of the hacking attempts. It isn't to attack the United States people, its to attack the United States government and get information not readily available to the public, future and current military projects. Really anything that United States government doesn't want anyone to know about. These Chinese and Russian hackers want to know our secrets not our personal individual secrets. Not to be a bubble burster here, but unless your name is of any importance like Angela Merkel or Barrack Obama you really aren't that special. Us the standard citizens hold little to no strategic value to Russian hackers attempting to take down the government.
These are the targets these hacking organizations want to compromise, not the lowly field technician at Staples, nor the stay at home mother in east L.A., you're all fine. But for some reason the Media like to spin up this long story about how the Chinese hackers are coming to take over the government, and take down our power grid. It gets everyone up in a little tissy about what are they going to do. Should they hide all their assets? Should they close every account they've ever had? Real dirt spinning turbulence to keep us on our toes. Chinese and Russian hackers have absolutely no interest in hacking us standard American citizens, so we don't have to worry.
Most of what these foreign entities are trying to do is simply spy, which in all honesty is something that has been going on for centuries, not trying to make light of the situation but its true. In the 80's and 90's when we heard a spy was uncovered sure we got a little perturbed at them, but none of us sat back and thought our bank accounts were stolen. The word hack just makes it sound way too close to home for all to many people. So let me reiterate Chinese and Russian hackers don't care about you, they only care about the big guns in power. Sorry there Media buzz machine, we need not worry.One more thing I'd like to go over is this power grid thing that is constantly a fear inducing "well what if the Chinese hackers get into our power grid." To put it lightly lets look at what the power grid really is. Let's first look at the continental United States of America. From Maine to south California one giant power grid correct? Well... actually it's not. The continental United States is broken up into three separate power grids, East, West, and Texas. Each of these three power grids does in fact hold very important pieces of our entire infrastructure, but any singular attack intended to take down the whole thing would require such a substantial amount of co-operation and planning to employ either dumb employee's in these establishments or out right spys.
Taking down these three separate grids would be catastrophic indeed, but to believe that power systems are accessible via an exterior network connection is just silly. If it were easy enough to log into the nuclear core of a multi billion dollar power facility it would've happened by now, this leads us to believe that any network connections to these cores is on an intranet and not the internet. Completely separated from the rest of the world, only access to destroying these would require in person manipulation. that's unlikely. If a foreign government somehow gets a person deep enough into our system to compromise it, we need to question our security authentication processing at these facilities.
In short, should we be worried about Chinese hackers? Should we be concerned about Russian hackers? In terms of the media head spin of we are all at risk, it's not true, we aren't important enough. In regards to obtaining military secrets, its highly plausible, just need to trust our government is going to fix their security protocol and try their hardest to make sure that doesn't happen.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, let me know in the comment section below. And as always, be safe my goblins.
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