5 Reasons Why Hacking Is Easy

Hackers were once known as people who are intelligently curious, a tireless explorer of computer systems. But when more and more hackers misuse their talents for their own personal gain, the term “hacker” took on a new meaning - as one who breaks into systems with evil purposes. Thus, below are the reasons why hacking is easy for hackers.

1. Dead Easy-To-Guess Password

• “123456”: There’s no excuse for this: plain laziness can cause one’s website or account to be hacked.

• “iloveyou”: Yes, so does the hacker that did this to you.

• “blahblah”: If you can’t be bothered to create a strong password, then blah to you too.

2. Easy Availability of Password-Guessing Software

Password Guessing Software and various Hacking tools can be easily found in the internet. All these software have the capability to run up to an astounding 8 million guesses per second. There is no way to take these software off the market, so the only thing a user could do is to change passwords often and enforce best practices when setting hard-to-guess passwords.

3. Vulnerability to Social Engineering

Social engineering is considered the art of manipulating people or computers, and this is usually employed by crooked hackers to gain access to what’s not rightfully theirs.

Here’s a good example we particularly like: recently in August, comedian Erik Stolhanske’s Twitter account was hacked by a cyber-security expert using merely his name. Earlier, the two individuals came to an agreement for the expert to try hacking his Twitter account, and Stolhanske was surprised that this was swiftly and easily achieved.

4. Bad Encryption System

Recently, Adobe’s systems were compromised as a massive 150 million Adobe user accounts were compromised, allowing hackers to cart away users’ email address, password, credit card details and other vital information. While there were some users who used easily-guessable common passwords, this constitutes only 3% of the entire 150 million accounts stolen. The rest of the blame may be placed on Adobe’s decision to choose symmetric key encryption over hashing, but they are opting to stay mum by not revealing if it’s bad encryption practice on their part.

5. Humans are Inherently Curious, Gullible, and Greedy

People may argue that hackers are getting more skillful in leveraging on hi-tech wizardry to hack into websites, but let’s take a look at the mirror and see how we may be responsible for our own downfall. Failure to update your WordPress software will lead to exposing your site’s vulnerability to hackers everywhere. That, ladies and gentlemen, is apathy. Malicious malware usually depended on curious users to click on a link or attachment, and most of the time, they are successfully in manipulating people this way.

We could go on and on about human weaknesses but if you are determined not to be “hacked”, you can practice the following due diligence:

• Assume nothing

• Believe no one

• Check everything

Written By:

Brandon Choo Jern Han

Bachelor of Public Relations (Honours)

Tunku Abdul Rahman University College