why acting like adults is the key to cybersecurity

Unless you live under a rock on an alien planet, you probably know all about the massive hacks which successfully revealed every digital asset used to run Ashley Madison, the much maligned, famous dating site for cheating spouses. And you probably also know of several very vocal and visible morality crusaders in the U.S. and Europe, who have been outed as long term members paying hundreds of dollars to guarantee having affairs. A top notch cybersecurity reporter with trusted sources in the web’s seedy underbelly, Brian Krebs, has already found evidence that an enterprising group of extortionists used the leaked data to blackmail some of the users in spear phishing campaigns, demanding bitcoins to keep their affairs quiet. Although one does wonder how effective this scam would be if the data is already easy to access and a concerned spouse could just do a search for familiar e-mail and physical addresses to find a match. Seems like an attempt to scare someone to reflexively hand over some hush money. But I digress a bit…

While it’s pretty hard to gather too much sympathy for people who cheated on their spouses or advocate for their privacy, even if every users’ situation may be different, and many more than likely did not actually meet anyone, whatever we may feel towards them shouldn’t obscure the very real problem with so much of our lives playing out on the web. We need to work past all of the moral outrage and schadenfreude and come to grips with the realization that we’re using a number of sites to do things with which we can be blackmailed. Sure, those who wanted to get laid behind their spouses’ backs have something to be ashamed of and issues to work though, but consider the previous big adult site hack, that of casual sex site Adult FriendFinder. Sure, a few users were definitely cheating on their spouses, most of the users were swingers, or simply looking for a hookup on a site that seemed large and recognizable enough to work for them to get some of their basic urges met, well outside the prying eyes of today’s societal moralists.

It’s one thing when you’re busted for trying to cheat or cheating, but when you’re either in open marriage arrangements, or are single and just want casual sex and get the same vultures with blackmail threats in your inbox for being an adult with a sex drive, shouldn’t that be different? If you use the web for anything less tame than reading the news and surfing social media sites, a dark cloud should not hang over your head with every hack. And sadly, there’s not much that’s possible to do to prevent large hacks like this. From sloppy coding, to outdated certificates, to a server that hasn’t been updated in months, there are simply too many vectors for an attack, so when you’re a large target, the surface area you have to keep secure forever is immense, while hackers need only one point of entry, once to do a lot of damage. Your best hope is just to not be interesting enough to warrant anyone’s attention to avoid being blackmailed, but given how many cybercriminals are out there, if your email is on a list, you’re a viable target anyway.

That leaves us with the question of what to do when the next embarrassing, adult-oriented hack comes. Note the “when,” not an if because there will be another one. The simple, but very likely unsatisfactory answer is to just own up to whatever may be found about your sex life and figure out how to deal with it if it’s something you’ve tried to keep under wraps but can’t. We can’t hide our preferences in the closet anymore because social media is everywhere and everybody has been using dating sites, mainstream or adult, leaving a lot of digital fingerprints. Maybe the new trend of opening up about sex in casual conversation is actually a good thing here. I’m certainly not talking about adding a favorite sexual position to your Facebook profile’s likes section, or an album of you with your favorite sex toys to Instagram, but more about not shying from any adult topics of interest to you. Because after all, why should you? You’re an adult, adults have needs, and they more often than not have the money, mobility, and chances to get them fulfilled.

In short, you are likeliest to have a leak blow over when people who know you see the hackers as leering perverts and bullies, not you as a hypocrite on a crusade against the immorality of a crumbling society, which is actually tamer than it’s been in over a century. If we learn anything from the shameful outings of pious moralists and user profile leaks from hookup sites, it should be that not being able to talk about your sex life like an adult or have a clear and constant lines of communication with your partners is what creates truly awful problems, and if you don’t own up to your wants and needs, and use the web, a hacker will do it for you at some point. And it may sound paradoxical, but it seems that instead of helping anonymity and leading double lives as some really hoped, the web, thanks to the rise of social media, is actually forcing our public personalities to match our private ones. It’s going to be a long transition, but one that seems to be pretty much inevitable because its driver is unprecedented and isn’t going to go away…