Iranians, Russians, and Chinese Hackers Are After You, Says Lawmaker 211
Velcroman1 writes "The House Intelligence Committee is warning that 'time is running out' before the next major cyberattack: The Russians, Iranians, Chinese, and others are likely already on your computer. 'You have criminal organizations trying to get into your personal computer and steal your personal stuff. And by the way, the Chinese are probably on your computer, the Russians are probably on your personal computer, the Iranians are already there,' House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R.-MI) said. 'They're trying to steal things that they think are valuable or use your computer to help them steal from someone else,' he said. 'That's a real problem.'"
So we need to snoop on your PC too (Score:5, Insightful)
just to make sure they aren't and for your own protection.....
Wow..... (Score:5, Insightful)
The linked article says it all. Nothing but more fearmongering from Fox News, and promotion of CISPA. Someone needs to have their editor's permissions revoked. oh wait....
Re:lol (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, wait, that's a lawmaker from Michigan. He's just spouting what the lobbyists from Symantec and McAfee are whispering in his year. False alarm.
Oh noes... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is normal users that do not really know what is happening on their computers and really do not care.
It always brings me back to images of windows users with 20 different toolbars loaded in to IE.
"criminal organizations" (Score:2, Insightful)
You have criminal organizations trying to get into your personal computer and steal your personal stuff.
You mean like the RIAA/MPAA and the Federal government?
Re:don't put all computers online (Score:2, Insightful)
How to you transfer files to those computers. USB drives? That's how hackers breach company networks.
Corporations penetrating my computer for data mining? No. Corporations tracking me every way they can without directly hacking? Yes.
What do you do with your never connected computers? The best I can come up with is watching movies or playing old games. Or do you have both side by side with your bank account open in the online computer and your other finical documents open of the offline computer? Though in that case criminals would be more interested in your banking password anyway. No one is going to manually look through your personal financial spreadsheets.
My concerns (Score:4, Insightful)
Always need boogeymen (Score:5, Insightful)
It could be worse. What if they started flying remote controlled drones around the world killing people with impunity?
One solution for a lot of the ID theft parts ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... is to require businesses to do a better job of distinguishing between mere identity, and actual authenticated authorization. For example, your SSN is just some numbers that can refer to you. Having an SSN is absolutely not authorization. If someone uses you SSN and a business chooses to charge your or open accounts to allow such charges, then they have failed to obtain authorization. In such a case, it should be required by new sensible law that if you state for the record that you did not authorize the transactions or whatever, then that business may not take any action whatsoever unless and until they can prove that you actually did authorize it. The "not take any action" means they cannot collect on debts, cannot place debts with a debt collector, cannot put it on your credit report (must take it off if already did). It has to be like it never happened.
The big problem with ID theft is that these businesses are not checking authorization. They need to start checking authorization or simply eat the loss.
Re:My concerns (Score:4, Insightful)
As a USian, I'm more concerned about US corporations and US government agencies being after me, they are the ones that can do and are most likely to do me some harm.
This is probably the most important thing to get across. The US population has been far more damaged by the likes of HUAC and the various secretive "intelligence" agencies than by any foreign bogeymen.
This isn't just a US problem, either. I've read a few comments from historians on the topic, saying that the data shows that during the last century, far more people (in the world as a whole) died due to their own government's actions than from any foreign soldiers or other attackers.
The data isn't nearly as good for previous centuries, but what data there is supports the claim for the rest of our history. The biggest danger everywhere comes from our own rulers, who rarely have our interests at heart.
In the on-topic case of network security, it's fairly clear that the primary interest of the US and all other governments is in controlling the communication of their own citizens.