I recently had the chance to see – actually I bought the film directly from YouTube for € 2.59 – the movie that won the Oscar as best foreign film in 2007, “The Lives of Others”.
The film tells the story of a writer and his companion, a famous stage actress, in the years of the GDR German Democratic Republic, a state existed since the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was East Germany, linked hand in glove to the Soviet Union, and where the Stasi, the “Ministry for State Security” kept watch on every individual citizen to make sure that everyone, including artists, was aligned in total and orthodox way to the Russian Socialist thought that put in first place, without any objection, the benefit of the party and of Leninist ideology.
At a distance of 50 years, however, the story has been completely reversed, with the US leader Obama that over the years of his mandate has intercepted and checked several European leaders, only to complain about election fraud for the activism of Russian hackers that would have favored the victory of Trump in the last election.
Simple post-election skirmishes, because Trump, as Obama did, can’t help investing in cyber-security, which means safeguarding a market, the exchange of data and information flowing in the network, that is the most fruitful for criminal associations after drugs, weapons and traffic in human beings.
Cyber security plays a fundamental role not just in politics but also in the corporate sector.
Two methods to defend ourselves: hire the best hackers to challenge “bad” hackers or to exploit new technologies, such as deep learning, promising artificial intelligence capable of very fast self-learning that can recognize new forms of threat and create adequate antibodies.
We’ll see, the cyberwar is just beginning. In the meantime, watch your data.