Book-Inspired Post 2- The Cult of the Dead Cow

While reading the Cult of the Dead Cow, it struck me, much like The Cuckoo’s Egg had, how different digital security was viewed back in the early days in the internet. In CDC’s case though, it stood out just how laughably flimsy digital security was in the early days. On the one hand, I can wrap my head around the big business mentality: if we can get away with being lazy without losing profits, guess what? We’re going to get away with it. I don’t like that mentality but I understand it. But on the other hand, I can’t wrap my head around how little the average consumer cared about digital security. It took being burned by Back Orifice (a hacking tool made by and published for free by CDC) to slap people upside the head and realize how much a security breach could hurt. I know my 2020’s Computer Science Major is the one talking here, but if you were living in the 1990’s and someone picked their way into your house, snooped through your photos and every document you had, and then left a little note on the fridge that said ‘Johnny was here,’ I’d like to imagine you’d freak out and get the cops on the phone. But at the same time if our Johnny character hacked your personal computer, rummaged through every file he could find, and left a hand-waving comment on your machine, the prevailing mentality at the time was ‘oh, as long as he didn’t hurt anything that’s just fine.’ I just can’t wrap my head around that—which is a good thing, since it shows me how far we’ve come in defining our digital rights, legalizing a company’s responsibility for the security of their products, and establishing ethical boundaries that, obviously, didn’t exist before someone made it blatantly obvious that they should.