Why is security important?

This is an introduction post, so it won't be very technical, maybe just a little bit theoretical. I'm a 23 years old computer enthusiast, that lives in Sibiu, Romania.

I've grown up around computers, and i'm still fascinated with them. They are logical, simple (at least most of the times) and human made. Think of almost any real world situation, and you can transform it into a computer problem/simulation. It's amazing what we have accomplished in only a few hundred years. Remember when we were fighting between ourselves with tanks? Or swords? Or even better, when we used rocks and spears to hunt for animals in order to provide our basic food? Those days are over.

We now have created computers to help us in our daily lives. We had the knowledge to do this. Come to think of it, we are playing God right now. There is only just a problem with it all: are we secure? Many people will argue now that cyber security isn't for us to concern. Is that so? Do you lock the door of your automobile when you're not in it? Do you lock your house when you're not around? The same thing you should do with your blog/e-mail/pictures and everything that you're sharing online. You must protect them at all cost. If you don't want something on the web about you, it's simple: don't do it.

Are you a simple user that surfs the Internet? Pick good passwords, udate your environment as many times as needed, use a daily updated antivirus, use a firewall, use a password on your account, lock your windows accout when you're away and you should be secure in general. [actually the only method to be secure 100% is to don't plug your computer, but this is another topic].

Are you a programmer? Things become more complicated now! With great power comes big responsibility. Not only that you should do all on the top by default, but if you're building a web application you should also implement input and output validation, error handling, authentication and authorization, session management, secure communication, secure resource access, secure storage and many more[visit owasp for more infos]. If you're building a non-web application, you must watch out for a lot of possible errors, here are just a few.

As you can see, things are more complicated as they look like, and this is normal. Things haven't been build with security in mind, we just adapted it on the fly and we pay for it now. Continue to ignore it and you'll see more things like this, this, this and many more alike. It's time to wake up and see the problems around us. Security is one of them, and it's big!

You can always contact me at klaudyus_at_gmail.com. Be safe!