Absolutely insecure

Life on earth is becoming more and more scientific - precise in time and shorter in space. This is how every culture has been advancing. Does it mean that we are becoming more and more insecure? In every city in India, the number of security guards is alarmingly increasing. In front of each city house, apartments, villas, shops, ATMs, banks, most business show rooms and prayer houses, don’t you see breathing mannequins in custom costumes, simply wasting time, counting the foot wears left aside?  There was a time in which we kept all data in hard copies. I remember that my father had only a wooden table and a draw with a lock to keep all our documents most important or less important. As decades swept off, things have changed and we have more physically secure and strong data storing systems and devices. The number of keys in our possession has increased and the few most important things a human being carries along have turned out to be a set of keys, a bunch of user names/passwords and a mobile phone. The net result? Everything has become more vulnerable to lifting and manipulation. Locks are easily broken and passwords are stolen with remote controls.

I did a little investigation into how secure we are. Here are some 2014 cyber crime news: ‘AT&T employee fired for accessing customer data.’ ‘Man Sentenced to Prison for Trying to Buy Stolen Data.’ ‘US Will Adopt Chip-and-PIN, The idea of storing credit card account information on a magnetic stripe, while innovative in 1960 when it was first conceived, is now vulnerable to theft, particularly because the data encoded on the magnetic stripes are static.’ ‘Internet Crime Complaint Center Warns of Spoofed Messages.’ ‘The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is warning organizations of a rise in insider threat cases’. ‘Google spots Malvertising Attack’. ‘Russian Police Arrest Two in Connection with Android Malware development’. ‘The Nigerian authorities are looking for a missing IT admin at an unnamed bank who is suspected of helping cyber criminals make off with 6.28 billion Naira ($38.6m)’. ‘Police in London, UK have arrested two people in connection with a software piracy ring’. ‘Several popular websites have been targeted by maliciously-crafted advertisements to infect site visitors' computers with malware’……. It never ends. What we understand is that we have become alarmingly open to all sorts of intrusions and thefts.

The situation in India, at a time in which all cultures in this land were at the zenith of their glory, was different. They knew the secret of Asteya – a stage of being happy with bare necessities only, a stage in which they knew that everything belongs to everybody. The more we refuse to share, the more we frantically strive to earn the more we become open and insecure. Today, the richest appears to be no way different from a street beggar surrounded by a universe of wealth but distinct in the quantity of fears and burdens he carries. We are yet to learn that satisfaction is not reserved to the haves alone and it is a referential state of mind, attainable to the poor and rich alike. Hail our ego, king of a few pounds of flesh and bones!    

Joseph Mattappally