[TriLUG] Geek....privacy and data security ------------was: Re: TriLUG Digest, Vol 3940, Issue 1

[Brian Henning via TriLUG]

> I feel I am such small potatoes that hackers are not going to spend time 
> on me and my machine.

I can comment on this, because I have had this argument with my dad many times over.

Hackers don't care how big or small a target you are, because their work isn't focused on *finding you*.  That's all done automatically by programs that do nothing but scan huge swaths of internet addresses looking for vulnerabilities.  Those programs don't know or care who owns the computer they found; they just know "machine at address X is vulnerable."

Secondly, a big hacking tool is still DDoS -- distributed denial of service.  This is done by having huge numbers of individual machines all over the internet all try to access the same server at the same time.  Those "huge numbers of machines" are colloquially known as "bot-nets."  Having your machine in his bot-net is a benefit to a hacker, whether your machine is an Amazon Web Services host or a Raspberry Pi in a tiny IoT project.  

Security matters, regardless of "small potatoes".  

Cheers,
-Brian