Posts Tagged ‘Senator’

Hacks are on the Increase

Imagine for a minute that you are a U.S. Senator. Imagine that you made someone angry. Now, imagine that the person who is angry is resourceful enough to figure out how to hack into one of your online social-media accounts. Maybe your Twitter account. Finally, imagine that the hacker started posting inflammatory messages, or at least embarrassing messages, in your name on your account.

According to Lucas Shaw at The Wrap, in a story picked up by Reuters, that’s exactly what happened to Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The Senator had reportedly been supportive of the Protect IP Act, PIPA, and the hacker, obviously, was not. The Senator’s experience was not really a disaster,  but it was at least an annoyance. Under other sets of circumstances, it could have been a disaster, just a very different kind of a disaster than the ones we usually discuss.

Unfortunately, hacking appears to be increasing. In fact, it’s so prevalent that hacking services have begun to spring up. And there are plenty of individuals more than happy to outsource their hacking requirements, as did one very wealthy individual involved in a nasty family feud.

Hackers are just one more reason why time travel is important. Whether your data gets corrupted by bit errors on disk drives, by software bugs, system failures, or malicious attacks by hackers, you need to be able to time travel and roll back your data to the last known good state. Then, if you have the right technology in place, you can carefully apply valid updates to the file or database, to get back to a good operational state.