Group work

Information Technology. What is this that influences our life so much? It’s all around us; it partially dictates us; it’s practically a crucial part of our life. From the moment we awake, IT greets us (in the form of our mobile phones), until the hour we retire to our slumber, IT hushes us onto the journey to dreamland (this being the task of the awesome i-pod). With this in mind, we can say that IT is here to stay. But as the field of IT continues to be developed into a higher level, we as human beings often forget to consider some of the small, though not insignificant, issue regarding IT. One of which being the implications that IT would have on our life and of its effects to the world that we live in, and subsequently our future.
One of the fields in which IT is often utilised is that of security. Not in the sense of preventing robbers from entering our houses, but more specifically security in terms of protecting our private information that are considered sensitive. Most of the time, unless an efficient, feasible and effective method is devised to guarantee the privacy of the users, problems such as identity theft etc, would continue to bother us in the future. The irony of the whole thing is that although many parties have assured their fellow users, the threat posed by unscrupulous characters like “hackers” is all too real and true.
All a “hacker” needs to do in order to dig out, for example, our credit card numbers, is a programme and a few very general information that are related to us. They can just hack into the bank’s database with the assistance of a few programmes available, exposing our confidential banking information.
Governments and law enforcement agencies often try their best to exterminate such problems, but in reality, the masterminds behind all these troubles are often hard to track down. They operate under the shadows of the almost infinite cyber world, using a variety of aliases and false identities, which could take ages to detect. By the time they are traced, too much time could have been wasted, and the suspect would by then have taken his share and fled into obscurity.
Most of the time, such malicious acts are driven by greed. But there are also those who are not drawn by the scent of money, but instead have only one purpose in mind, that is, to disrupt someone’s life. Think of it for a moment. Why would someone want to hack into our e-mail account? And why do people want to create viruses like Trojan Horse etc? It’s surely not because of money. No. These people are not motivated by greed, but they are doing it just for fun. Some just want to experience the “thrill”. Called it sheer madness or whatever you like, they give no heed to others.
If such sensitive information were to fall into the wrong hands, the repercussions would be catastrophic. Imagine someone using your ATM PIN numbers to withdraw cash from your account, and not forgetting, using our credit cards to purchase items online. Also, our identities could be forged, and sold to those who are engaged in a host of unspeakable deeds. I once heard about someone in Malaysia who got in trouble with the Registration Department, because suddenly the department recorded him as “deceased”. Apparently there was another person who held an identical identity card, and that person was killed in an accident. Our stolen personal details could also be used by criminals to frame us for a crime that we did not commit.
Since its first appearance, IT has so far been beneficial to advancement of the human race. Through IT, our lives have dramatically changed from a time where gears and steam rule, to an age where almost everything depends on electronics. The IT era is here to stay definitely; no one can dispute that fact anymore. Nevertheless, the negative sides of IT are still real, and unless we strife to counter these, the problems posed will continue to haunt us as long as IT exists.