A real talk about privacy

Although part of me is in the I'm not doing anything illegal so go ahead and spy on me crowd, I do have other concerns.

Again, it has to do with hackers. While I may not be committing any crimes (or at least none that I am aware of), I have been on the phone talking or texting and have heard or said, say, an occasional racist type joke. I've gotten into arguments with friends and family where we have said some, let us say, 'not nice' things. If all that stuff is collected and digitally stored somewhere, so be it. My problem is, what happens if a hacker gets their hands on it? Any one of us could be painted to look like absolutely awful individuals. Careers could be destroyed, etc. THAT is why privacy is important and this stuff makes me nervous.

originally posted by: eluryh22
It seems like the 'bad guys' are always one step ahead. Is it really much of a stretch to think that hackers or 'bad guys' could do their deeds and make it seem like it is coming from someone else's computer? What with everyone's home being wireless/wifi spots. How hard would it be for someone to hack into someones bank account and make it look like it was done from a neighbor's computer?

There is no such thing as a secure computer system. The basis of computer security is that it will take longer to get into your system than it will take to find someone who is less secure. It's been a couple years since my days of wifi hacking so my information on techniques may be slightly out of date but most routers these days use WPA2 encryption which is very secure. It takes days to break into a WPA2 connection vs hours for WPA and minutes for WEP. In the time it takes to sit there and break a WPA2 encrypted wifi signal you're better off driving around and looking for another victim. WPA2 has been the default for a number of years now, to the point that almost everything is WPA2, which means you're generally looking for the odd person that has open wifi, or you're looking for a coffee shop without the necessary security on their router to stop what you want to do.

If you're at the level that you can break into a bank and compromise peoples accounts you're probably not going to be doing it from a single residential network, instead it's probably going to be a distributed attack using a bot net, and you're more interested in compromising their computer than their wifi.