October Is Cyber-Security Awareness Month…

I’ve never been a Hallmark Holiday kind of chick, not even when it comes to my birthday.  Setting aside time periods on a calendar to coerce(?) an individual to examine an aspect of the human conditions has always pleaded with me to be ignored from a designated time period set aside for me and by others.

And yet here I am feeling a tad bit guilty this morning for not getting around to acknowledging that the month of October has been chosen at least by some as “Cyber-Security Awareness Month.”

Now I am only 39 years old, but the distance between the intervals of fact versus fiction nuggets of knowledge I possess when it comes to anything Cyber can certainly seem insurmountable (perhaps thanks to the mathematics involved with broadcasting in these virtually instantaneous manners?) but one must start somewhere if they are seeking to raise their “awareness” of “cyber-security.”

I mean, smart as I am from time to time, what part of cyber-security can use a major rise in not only degrees of awareness regarding the issue, but perhaps a slight push in a more mellow direction?  I myself spent this past New Year’s Eve recording the rising and falling of a sorta long list of keywords since preventing fraud to a state of perpetual perfection is impossible and Mass Mailing Success Rates Satisfaction Levels can take the probability equation that promises a 0.5% to 4.0% return on the action.  So perhap focus on the topic of spam would be the most contribuatory to this particular effort…?

But then again, having over 95 banks sinking into the forever-more during 2009 not only brings to mind the issue of dormant accounts, who owns them, how such materials can/should and cannot/should not be used and then ranging in scope and format from the pay online organizations all the way to these brick and mortar buildings who are surrendering their paperwork to a variety of individuals for further amendment and alteration at such a great speed, how many of them have ever ordered up a forensic audit of their books as being purchased, reviewed and subsequently certified in some manner?  If I’ve lost you, try to think about it this way.

How many people have established in their wills how online accounts/materials will be distributed?  Deleted?  What about an online pay account attached to the sale of a product still being manufactured and distributed, such as with an e-book perhaps?  What about an account containing original music or replication of an original painting?  Is it even possible any more to sustain at least a temporary conduit to choice of ownership?

Whereas rumors used to be that individuals would request lists of newly copyrighted materials with the United States Copyright Office, how does such a concept affect/effect the conduits being used to transfer such materials?  And anyone who has ever tried an online delivery service of large media files knows that just because the file name says one thing, what the file actually contains is actually its own version of an online slot machine in which the concept of “winning” is relative to whether or not someone is going to celebrate contracting some sort of computer virus or perhaps a package of pornography.

With the speed of live events being transferred to a forum that promises at least some level of accessibility, what about the traffic-related statistics that are generated when a call is made to vote for something or other?  The statistics quoted by the various ClickBank Trackers this past election cycle never rested on the asterisk attached to those types of statistics.  Last I heard there were over 10 million bot computers and that they were beginning to morph away from a large-bulk “format” into smaller collections.  When was the last time someone ran a virus program on their system let alone wiping a hard drive?  The mathematics behind CAPTCHA were cracked a while ago and attached to a user using their mouse to strip some woman of her designated virtual cloth coverings with the reward of a completely different view of the body attached to the face and clicks can be be covered so that the tracks of such actions successfully camouflage one of the many possible pay-per-click fraud schematics…who pays for securing the bandwidths from predatory algorithms?  What would be classified a “predatory algorithm” anyway?  Packet sniffers?  Other password stealing mathematics?  Logging the keystrokes of a minor?  Of a domestic abuse victim?  For business purposes?  For commercial purposes?  Who owns such types of logs?  Possession of click records is what degree of the laws of ownership…for profit?  For accountability purposes?  For communication purposes?

Yeah.  The idea that any one month can be set aside to work through even a short list of topics associated with our use of technology in our day to day lives has a certain potential for laughability, but does this issue demand only decorum and civility while approaching it from the salesperson end of the spectrum?  I’ll have to keep thinking that one through a few more times.

In the meantime…it is a curious thought as to whether or not anyone has reflected upon their own awareness levels of at least a few of these causes and effects of our choosing to amplify our existence in such life altering one way or another and in such multi-dimensional manners?