When the FBI asked Apple to help crack the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, the agency was wading into dangerous waters. That's according to an essay by Susan Landau, Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, published today in the journal Science . Landau, who worked as a privacy analyst for Google, writes that the FBI's approach was shortsighted and risked undermining smartphone protections for users across the board while inviting exploitation of the resulting security weaknesses by bad guys.
Cybersecurity is a huge point of contention between the public and private sectors. Tech companies vie to stay unregulated in the services and level of encryption they provide to their customers, while the government seeks to mandate certain benchmarks they feel would keep the country's data safe.
It was my first day on the job as chief technology officer for "SnapCat," and the hostile attacks on our servers came at us fast. With proper coding and security measures, I blocked some, but my cat boss informed me after that attack that about a third of our users were driven away from the site because of our poor security. In PBS’s online Cyber Lab game, players select avatars and fictional companies, and then learn the basics of cyber security through simple exercises.
In 2009, the annual Pwn2Own cybersecurity competition provided hackers with a shot at cracking smartphones. They failed. In September, the event offered phones as targets again. This time, contestants seized control of them, successfully exploiting vulnerabilities in the two most popular operating systems, iOS and Android.
