Hacking And Security - The Headache For The Average User

Hacking is one of the things of the world and everything has its pros and cons. Just today we reported that Ourmine had hacked the account of Twitter's own CEO Jack Dorsey and just a few weeks back, Google's head-honcho Sundar Pichai was targeted.

All this was done in order to expose the limitations of the systems. What did they achieve though? Sundar Pichai's Quora account was hacked but the administration flatly denied any breaches in their systems while Twitter keeps on stressing towards unique passwords and 2-Step authentication. But no matter how strong our passwords are, there will always be someone out there who can hijack it.

Microsoft is going as far as to say that passwords are going obsolete and the security of the future is biometric verification, iris recognition and much more. However the equipment for most of the proposed alternatives is either too expensive or not commercialized yet. So this begs to question how we keep our accounts secure?

The Morning Coffee Just Got A Little Too Hot

Ourmine believes that almost all of our current social networks are insecure and their campaign is to hack the influential and most popular accounts on these networks, post a promotional tweet from its account and asking the webmasters to buy their services to expose the potential flaws within their system. And I reckon this is pretty restrained approach for someone who may have access to the Twitter's CEO account because the usual start posting out weird stuff. But despite all these formalities, should the user privacy be intruded for his security?

I remember my Facebook account got hacked once by my own friend just for fun. It was my fault but he went pretty lenient, adding unknown people and liking weird pages but I was kinda distraught afterwards. Imagine the feelings of someone who has his account compromised for the sake of improving the soundness of the system. His/her's privacy, his/her's trust all gone.

Hacking is an extremely touchy subject and one on which I am sometimes a little afraid to discuss too. But in my opinion, this is a little too far. Some organizations have condemned the Ourmine and one person actually claimed to have traced the IP of Ourmine to Saudi Arabia, which they have flatly denied. It's not just Ourmine too though, there are many others who do this for their own personal benefit and only some of them have been taken down.

The burden of security of one's account is on the person and the organization but when a third force comes into play, neither of them can be considered responsible. Ideally everyone talks about strong passwords but give us a break will ya! Either you put in an impenetrable password and end up forgetting it yourself. Tough break here. The best possible alternative is biometric verification but tell me, how many systems have it integrated? Negligible.

So in the war of over the top players and the security conservatives, The average user is always in a pickle in this situation. So the question is, Hacking for exposing flaws in the system ethical? And what methods should users adopt to keep themselves more secure?