Human Vulnerabilities.

"The Hacker's Deli-ma" as Sam Esmail would call it.

Hacking works on one fundamental principle - things have vulnerabilities, you exploit that vulnerability. A web-server may have a vulnerability that sending a certain HTTP request to that server crashes the server. That is a vulnerability. The web-server is vulnerable. If I as a hacker intend to crash the server I can write an exploit for that vulnerability. The exploit can be as simple as using Postman or writing a python script to send that HTTP request to crash that web-server.

In the real world vulnerabilities are rarely this basic. Though they do exist. Every "software update" that adds features is very likely to add security vulnerabilities with it. For this reason its highly advised to always delay feature updates and only do security updates as soon as they come out.

These vulnerabilities are often called "zero day exploits" or "oh-day exploits". These can be vulnerabilities that the latest iOS version might have and is live on millions of devices. These vulnerabilities are bought and sold on markets that involves government intelligence agencies and spyware organisation. They usually target high profile personalities.

What are YOUR vulnerabilities?

When you talk to a person, you tell them about yourself. You tell them about your past, your passions, your loves and your fears. You open up to people because you trust them and its feels good to open up.

Knowledge about us always have vulnerabilities. Someone's vulnerability can be that they had a past of drug addiction. Someone had a smoking problem. Someone is addicted to porn. Someone is easy to trust and easily fall for people. We talk to strangers on the internet. We trust that everyone on that public discord server will never exploit our vulnerabilities.

Whatever it be - these are vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities have exploits. Exploits that can be used by people to take over you. It doesn't have to be as strong as owning people. It could be as small as getting access to their life, getting access to computer and their data.

If someone says "Google data centers are un-hackable", I would point out that every human that works on that Google data center is a vulnerability. You just have to find the right method to exploit that vulnerability, leading you to access into the data center that only that person would have.

This is a reason people with top level clearance like executives or FBI agents are advised to keep a private life. Knowing where the CEO of Google is going for their next date can be a vulnerability waiting to exploited.

We're humans. We're not perfect. We have vulnerabilities. We love, hate, and get addicted to things and people. That's what makes us human. That's what makes us vulnerable.

Maybe that's the beauty of humanity.

Heavily inspired from Sam Esmail's great work Mr. Robot.