Welcome to ‘The Year of the Happy Hacker’

The year 2014 is destined to go down as ‘The Year of the Happy Hacker’.

Never have hackers, who turn mega profits on millions of unprotected, unwitting consumers, had it so good. Today it’s Target Corp and Neiman Marcus and as yet unnamed smaller retailers. They’re only the latest on a growing long list that includes online giant Adobe’s 2.9-million customers’ 2013 data breach. In 2010, The Wall Street Journal reported a broad new hacking attack with the personal data of 2,500 companies being breached. The government’s not doing anything about it, because some of the power brokers of the day are in on it. Hacking emails is a thriving bloodsport for politicians determined to smear their opponents out of the race. Some suspect Hillary Clinton’s hand in the current Governor Chris Christie George Washington Bridge scandal as Clinton looks to the 2016 presidential race.

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It’s only a tough banana attitude from the government on the millions of citizens left open for identity theft after hijack by hackers. Barack Obama-style Big Government has not only opened the floodgates to massive identity theft of the names, mailing addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses of Target Corp’s 70 million customers, it is doing nada to close off access to cyber attacks by well-trained hackers. In fact, Big Government, through ObamaCare which experts warn has a wide open data base, is one of the prime happy hackers. Obama’s lies that you can keep your doctor have been caught up in the telling, and millions recognize that they will lose their health insurance in Obama’s insistence for socialized medicine, but how many know they have been laid vulnerable to a stranger getting a mortgage in their name or having to pay for new lines of credit taken out in their name by strangers? Merchants are required to own up to security breaches when the personal information of their customers is compromised. The government does not acknowledge the potential for cyber attack through ObamaCare. In the aftermath of the holiday season, Target Corp, Neiman Marcus are only two of the giant retailers reporting major security breaches. “Smaller breaches on at least three other well-known U.S. retailers took place and were conducted using similar techniques as the one on Target, according to the people familiar with the attacks. Those breaches have yet to come to light. Also, similar breaches may have occurred earlier last year.” (Reuters, Jan. 11, 2014). Law enforcement sources suspect the ring leaders of the massive hacking operations originate in Eastern Europe, which is where most big cyber crime cases have been hatched over the past decade. China and Iran are also big players in cyber attacks. Tracking them down is the job of the Secret Service and Department of Justice. That hacking by cyber attack continues to plague citizen life tells a frightening story. Happy Hacking has become the Wild West of the 21st Century. The National Security Agency (NSA) is the main producer and manager of signals intelligence (SIGINT) for the USA. Estimated to be one of the largest of U.S. intelligence organizations in terms of personnel and budget, the NSA operates under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and reports to the Director of National Intelligence. The NSA employs an estimated 30,000-40,000 employees and has an estimated budget of $10.8 billion. (Wikipedia) The NSA is tasked with the global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, including surveillance of targeted individuals on U.S. soil. Yet this monolithic organization was easily compromised by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who at the time of his departure from the United States in May 2013, had been employed by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton for less than three months inside the NSA at the Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Hawaii. Snowden, whose job it was to look for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world, made away with over 2 million NSA files. Viewed as a whizz kid by NSA brass, Snowden was deemed “a genius among geniuses”. A former colleague said Snowden was “given full administrator privileges with virtually unlimited access to NSA data” because he could “do things nobody else could”. “Snowden had been offered a position on the NSA’s elite staff of hackers, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), but turned it down for the contractor position at Booz Allen. The rest, as they say, is history. The big story of NSA has been how it’s spying on citizen emails and telephone calls. Its failure to protect the same citizenry from rogue hackers has barely been mentioned in mainstream media reports. Ditto for History now repeating itself with the wide open ObamaCare data base that will leave millions more open to financial ruin through rampant identity theft.