If you’re an old school buff, what I’m about to tell you may freak you out a little bit…
But if you were born before 1980 – everything you know about the way of doing business is outdated.
Sure, us dinosaurs have seen many things change over the last few decades – but that’s nothing compared to where we’re headed.
And it’s not only business that’s changed…
The way we meet people, shop and communicate is all done over computers and the internet – making the world both bigger and smaller at the same time.
This hyper-expansion of our known reality has brought people from different countries and different cultures closer than ever before, yet at the same time, further apart…
And it’s that distance – our differences – that are leading us down a dangerous road, because one of the many things that have changed in the 21st Century…
Is how war is and will be waged.
Now this isn’t about unmanned tanks or drones – or even nanotechnology – this is about an even dirtier and potentially more debilitating form of fighting…
Cyberwarfare.
Cyberwarfare is being waged right now. So much so, world governments have been forced to employ their own team of hackers in order to not only defend their country from attacks, but also to engineer counter attacks or pre-emptive attacks of their own.
ISIS, the Russian Government, the Chinese Government, even the hacker group, Anonymous can cripple our country with the stroke of a key.
We’ve heard the terms before…
Hacking, sabotage, espionage – all things that took spies or double agents to orchestrate just 20 years ago – can now be done by a pimply-faced teenager sitting in his parent’s basement.
It’s frightening how much power one person can hold with access to the internet – with just a few different keystrokes, these people can gain full control over ACTUAL weapons of mass destruction – and be ready to fire them with just a push of a button.
The past few years have been chock FULL of cyber incidents and I’m not just talking about Hillary’s personal server debacle…
Take a look at some of the below messes:
- China, one of the world’s biggest instigators of cyberwarfare, has waged attacks against both The New York Times and The Washington Post. These attacks were espionage operations designed to uncover names of Chinese dissidents that may be sources of the political and socioeconomic happenings in their country to these news outlets.
- Twitter was hacked, an attack that affected 250,000 accounts. Twitter acknowledged that his was an attack – that it wasn’t a prank or an accident – they alleged that it was carried out by professionals with an agenda.
- NetSeer, an internet advertising company, was hacked. Their site was infected by malware, causing content to be blocked by Google and other internet gateways.
- Hacker collective, Anonymous, took aim at the banking sector, and reportedly posted 4,000 login credentials for senior banking officials. Anonymous also hacked into (repeatedly, it turns out) and defaced two government Web sites.
- The Department of Homeland Security advised users to disable UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n Play) technology – a key technology that makes it easier to connect devices like printers to internal networks. Over 80 million devices were identified in an Internet-wide scan as being vulnerable to accepting and executing malevolent code payloads.
And these were just the crimes that were discovered!! Imagine how many went unnoticed…
But these incidents are peanuts compared to what these hackers could actually do.
How far can their reach stretch?
Well, it’s not inconceivable that a hacker team could, with relative ease, break the backbone of the World Wide Web.
Now to some, this doesn’t sound like it would be all the damaging, like being transported back to 1994, but…
When taken into account how much business is conducted over the web (and we’re not talking about the over $2.2 trillion in retail sales alone) an internet crash could potentially be as destructive as a nuclear bomb.
The worst thing is…
There’s nothing anybody can do about it.
Or is there?
There are companies, public companies traded on the exchanges, that are working right now and making the moves to protect their customer’s information or websites should anything happen to the actual World Wide Web.
If you think of the internet as the “information super highway” then these companies would be supplying their members safe “information harbors” that could weather any storm these hackers whip
up.
And in the event of the World Wide Web being broken, these alternate pathways will be what allow business to continue as normal…
For those who have paid a HEFTY sum for the service.
Now a days, there are literally THOUSANDS of companies that depend on the internet, and they’re already making contingency plans for this, what some call, inevitable catastrophe.
Multi-billion dollar companies like Microsoft, Amazon and others have already put their faith, and dollars, into these “alternative internet” stocks in order to ensure that their business doesn’t suffer from a full on world cyberwar.
This is something I’m mindful of when researching picks for my GorillaTrades service. Technological awareness can take a company far – and with the type of stocks we recommend – the safer the better!
You can rest assured that I always have at least one ear to the ground – searching for the company with the next major technological advancement in cybersecurity.
We’d love for you to join us on our next Wall Street adventure – but I understand if you’d like to be out on your own. Just keep in mind how important these kinds of stocks are to our future.
It makes one wonder if we have become too advanced for our own good…
Maybe we’re getting too dependent on technology for our own good…
It’s a thought we all must keep in mind – but much like Pandora’s Box – it seems that the internet, once embraced, can’t be abandoned.
The only thing we can do, is prepare…
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” – Carl Sagan