.Hacked/You

From a few geeks to an entire subculture. and now you're connected too.

- Arnab Mukherjee

It’s an ordinary day at work – you switch on your system, go through your email, check a few attachments. Eventually, you log off for lunch, and by the time you’re done and are back at your desk – congratulations, you’ve been hacked! Your system and all the files on it are being held hostage by some college kid on vacation with too much free time on his hand. Welcome to the world of modern hackers.

2016 was, by many measures, the worst year for digital security. Although every passing year is turning out to be exactly that, 2016 had its fair share of leaks and breaches. In fact, it had a good helping of revelations from years gone by as well – be it the 2012 LinkedIn breach which affected 117 million instead of the originally estimated 6 million or the double reveal from Yahoo totalling to a hefty 1.5 billion credentials lost to attacks in 2013 and 2014.

Gone are the days when hackers were accurately depicted in popular culture. The general conception about hackers has remained unchanged – some geeks sweating their fingers out over keyboards, furiously typing out malicious code and attacks in a secret basement. As long as we hold that image in our head – we’ll never really understand hackers, and hence, their actions. So to start off, let us talk about that hacker in the basement, and why he almost no longer exists.