America Trends Podcast

America Trends Podcast


EP 628 If You Lock Your Front Door, Your Home Is Better Protected Than Your Digital Life

February 08, 2023

When the internet was a shiny new object, it was understandable that we did not take security that seriously.  But today it is home to most of the important information in our lives, including our financial records.  The same holds true for corporations and nations, including delicate information that can affect our national security as well as our critical infrastructure.  At the same time, the ability to hack the internet is not only possible by malevolent nation-states, but also bad actors and hacker gangs who do it for a range of reasons, including large ransoms.  Unlike in the analog world there is no cyber–Coast Guard that is going to come and bail us out if we lose our data.  Yet, to date evidently, the penalty for going unguarded seems to be seen by most entities as less than the cost of putting up strict cyber walls against incursion.  In his book “The Unhackable Internet”, Attorney Thomas Vartanian, with long experience in the financial and banking sector, suggests we are playing with fire and a cyber- Pearl Harbor is inevitable unless we take a number of steps that he lays out in the book.