Send In a Hacker

I have always heard that to stop a monster you need another monster. I have also heard the phrase fight fire with fire. The news has been filled with debates over the proper response to the cyber-attacks on Sony. Obama said that the U.S. is reviewing whether to put North Korea back on its list of state sponsors of terrorism. He also vowed that the U.S. would  respond “proportionately” to the attacks and wouldn’t be “intimidated by some cyber-hackers.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called the cyber-hacking “an act of terrorism” and suggested re-imposing sanctions on North Korea and adding the country to the terrorism list. While all these responses are normal and are perhaps the way to respond to the usual attacks in the real world, they do not apply to the people who committed this attack. To stop a hacker or catch one we need to send in a hacker.

 

Yeah, that’s right, send in a hacker to catch or beat one. It’s OK to enact sanctions, but the only ones able to get in and go “zero dark thirty,” these bad guys are the types of hackers we either have locked away, or working for security companies and antivirus corporations. You guessed it, some of the programmers that make our computers safe are former hackers themselves. There are all types of questions over how the public response should be. To me its simple. Don’t send sanctions, don’t send Seal Team Six, send in someone like Penelope Garcia, although this reference may not be the one to paint the right picture. There are hackers that have been locked up in this country for some pretty strange things, including hacking the Defense Threat Reduction Agency server. The DTRA is an agency of the Department of Defense charged with reducing the threat to the U.S. and its allies from nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. 

So let’s hope that while they are talking about these things on the news and discussing what they intend to show the public as their response, they are actually making sure several lines of code are being sent out to hunt and destroy the hackers responsible to cracking Sony studios. With the amount of our lives and the percentage of information and actions that are stored and controlled digitally in this country and every other country, we need to take this as seriously as any other threat, and send in a hacker or a whole team of hackers to protect us from what is an understated, yet very real threat.

Send In a Hacker