I remember back in early 2010s and 2000s thered be headlines of major companies getting hacked by some 16 yr old in their basement. Nowadays u barely hear a peak about hacker groups defacing some major website or shutting down server of some website . What has changed and has it become harder for amateurs or civilians to hack major organizations ?
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There's probably a few factors involved. One I can think of is that security has simply gotten better and more commonplace. Nowadays you see 2FA everywhere, but iirc this wasn't always the case. Another thing to consider is that web services have become much more centralized in the last few decades, and I'm sure that the companies who offer those services probably have great infosec.
The infosec world is full of activity. It hasn't slowed down in the least. The mainstream news orgs cover it less but you can check out sites like https://thehackernews.com or https://cybersecuritynews.com and see that the blackhats are always up to something.
cool to know.
Computer security was a joke 15+ years ago, now it's a basic requirement for pretty much any new software. Before, passwords sent over the web often weren't even encrypted (basic HTTP protocol) while today's HTTPS (HTTP-Secure encrypts anything it sends) is a requirement seen by browsers. Open source software seems to be much more common these days as well since "security by obscurity" i.e., thinking something is secure because people don't have access to its source code is seen as a really bad thing. Given all this + many other advancements in security, it's getting harder and harder to hack anything these days.
Most who do it for money work as whitehat hackers, exposing and reporting security flaws, not exploiting them. Rouge/black hat hacking has become mostly activitism or part of cyberwarfare. Security is still being busted, but by countries like North Korea in order to steal intel and money from others.
I'm not deep in the scene, it dosen't concern me beyond piracy and net neutrality, so don't put too much weight in what I have to share. This is just my basic understanding of the deal with hackers in the modern age.
Any tech savvy person in the past could do a massive cyberattack through basic email scams and stuff, now those things are done by basic ad spam and stuff you can avoid easily.