Page 76 - index

User Friendliness is Making Us Vulnerable

By: Arman Sidhu

“A Short History of the Internet,” is a piece authored by Bruce Sterling, penned in 1993, more
than two decades worth of technology has eclipsed since the article was written and much of
Sterling’s predictions hold true. For example, he mentions how the Internet’s spread will be
unprecedented and near the end produces this concluding statement: “By the turn of the
century, “network literacy,” like “computer literacy” before it, will be forcing itself into the very
texture of your life.

Flash forward twenty years, and our technology and utilization of the Internet has exploded with
social media, electronic commerce, mobile application, and the much heralded “Internet of
Things.” As our technology has evolved, so has our behavior with technology, we constantly
starve for the newest innovation, and we demand much from the developers, programmers, and
engineers that always seem to cater to our needs as users in growing digital universe. Our
communication with others is faster, information on anything and everything is more accessible
than ever, and we just can’t wait till the little annoying tasks we go through in our lives, whether
at home or work, are automated at a level where we no longer worry about them.

Running parallel with our praises, we saw a rapidly developing dark side to our technology. We
worried about our privacy and security being vulnerable, either to Big Brother’s surveillance or
from hackers looking to profit from our fragile “security” practices.

Yet as we’ve passed through the Sony Hack, PRISM leaks, the Heartbleed Bug, the Password
heist by a Russian cyber gang, infiltration of private photos of celebrities, and the attacks on
Target and Home Depot, the gap between secure systems and those hell-bent on intrusion has
hardly decreased in size. Social media reports the attacks but seldom spread information to
beef our security as vulnerable users. When we deem it time for our occasional password
change, we gain a false sense of relief. For even the simple task of a password change has
managed to become a hassle and even rendered useless. The trend of two-factor
authentication might have caught on for some, but many of us still avoid it when we can. Anti-
virus companies give us a sense of security, but they have their faults, and few of us maintain
the recommendations that IT administrators in our workplace.

The reason probably isn’t (and shouldn’t) be because we don’t feel vulnerable, but instead
stems from the double-edged sword known concisely as Usability, or interchangeably known as
User Friendly, a phrase that dominates the planning stages of virtually every consumer tech
product, and while it provides us with the quick learning curve, it also leads us to a state of
disbelief when our apps crash, don’t respond, and fail to fulfill us with the utility we downloaded
them for.

Thanks to the surge in mobile and tablets, our interaction is consistently being judged by
companies looking to deliver the best product available. With this, we lose out on basic security
practices, many aren’t capable of troubleshooting the most basic of errors, and we silently lose
out on control of securing the data and information we transmit each and every day.
76 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – December 2014 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide