Understanding WikiLeaks trying to separate the politics from the technology

As a technology professional for many years, and a writer of technology topics, many folks have asked questions of me, trying to understand the various aspects of the WikiLeaks story in the news.

In a previous article we discussed a basic understanding of WikiLeaks strictly from a technology point of view. As all the stories of WikiLeaks and all the political baggage ripples through the news, there is a lot of technology going along for the ride with all the social and political issues.

Cyber crime is now a hot topic. As more people understand the value of information, they also understand that the destruction of this information, or the ability to deny a business the access to this information can be very disruptive, or very costly.

One of the things the world wide web has done is given people with similar interests a way to collaborate and share ideas and information.  Unfortunately,some of the people sharing information and collaborating have a similar interest of being disruptive.

WikiLeaks sympathizers turn cyber criminals

Major financial institutions like MasterCard and Visa cut ties to WikiLeaks. There have been apparent cyber attack against MasterCard and Visa this past week. Regardless of the social, political, or legal reasons behind their decisions, it caused them to be targets for WikiLeaks sympathizers. 

When a group of people collaborate across the internet, a lot can happen in a short amount of time, and websites can be attacked from multiple locations through out the world, tying up resources, keeping legitimate business from taking place.

Putting cybercrime into perspective

If a disgruntled employee could rally up a group of former employees of your company to picket your place of business to scare away customers. or make bogus phone calls to your company to tie up your operators so they had less time to do legitimate business with customers, that would be disruptive and costly to your company.

Take the same analogy, and apply it to the internet. Multiply this same scenario, where now you have have the ability to rally millions of people to a cause, and have people from all over the world working together to disrupt your website. The results could be very costly.

Regardless of where you stand on the social and political issues associated with WikiLeaks, the technological implications of cyber criminals using the distraction of WikiLeaks creates serious concerns for financial markets and processes that have become very dependent on using internet technology.
 

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