Aristotle’s statement, “That which is common to the greatest
number has the least care bestowed upon it.
Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest;
and only when he is himself concerned as an individual”, really resonates with
me in terms of how people treat each other in today’s society. Everyone is so focused inward, having no
regard for anyone or anything that does not directly affect them. This selfishness is having a negative effect
on our security as a whole, but as it relates to cyber security, we are doing
ourselves a disservice by not caring about the plight of others. For example, when the popular website Ashley
Madison was hacked, many people felt those whose information was stolen and
exposed deserved it because of the purpose of the site to facilitate extramarital
affairs. Rather than coming together as
a whole and demanding those responsible be punished for violating other’s privacy,
people blamed the victims and began to take advantage of the data breach. According to the Wikipedia article below “In
the days following the breach, extortionists began targeting people whose
details were included in the leak, attempting to scam over US$200 worth of Bitcoins
from them. One
company started offering a "search engine" where people could type
email addresses of colleagues or their spouse into the website, and if the
email address was on the database leak, then the company would send them
letters threatening that their details were to be exposed unless they paid
money to the company.” The Ashley
Madison case was big news when it first broke but the focus was not as it
should have been, on the hackers for committing a criminal act, but was instead
focused on victim blaming. In the
Wikipedia article, “Carolyn Gregoire argued that ‘Social media has created an
aggressive culture of public shaming in which individuals take it upon
themselves to inflict psychological damage and that more often than not, the punishment
goes beyond the scope of the crime’ and Graham Cluley argued that the
psychological consequences for people shamed could be immense, and that it
would be possible for some to be bullied into suicide.”
When Yahoo revealed last month that it discovered another
significant data breach, no one seemed to be up in arms. In fact, Yahoo tried to keep this information
under the radar according to the article below, “The Company quietly revealed the data breach in security
update in December 2016, but the news was largely overlooked, as the statement
from Yahoo provided information on a separate data breach that occurred in
August 2013 involving more than 1 billion accounts.” Many people, even those not directly affected
by the Yahoo breach, are outraged that such a big name company failed to protect
its customer data and believe the culprits should be prosecuted, but where was
that collective compassion for the Ashley Madison hack victims? Aristotle would say that because they were
not directly affected but the Ashley Madison hack, they care less about those
that were and that because the Internet is common to all and owned by none, no
one is taking a vested interest in protecting it.
We accept an “it’s all about me” mentality in our society,
and think that behavior such as cutting someone off in traffic because I’m more
important and have places to be is acceptable…except when we are the person that
is cut off. If we cared more about society
as a whole and approached resolving issues for the good of many, we may have
less security issues and more people making an effort to protect our privacy and data.
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