Have you ever been hacked?

From phishing, malware and ransomware to keyloggers, remote access Trojans and man-in-the-middle attacks… there’s no shortage of ways that bad people can use technology against you. 

We’ve all heard the horror stories. And if you’re like me, you probably know some of the ways that tech companies, businesses and individuals try to protect themselves. Anti-virus, firewalls and two-factor authentication are pretty commonplace now. We all know not to click on links in suspicious-looking emails, not to open video links in Facebook messages that come with the caption “OMG is this you?” and we definitely know that there is no dying billionaire in Nigeria who wants to give us his inheritance! But I bet there’s a ton of stuff we don’t know too. 

Like did you know that hackers can now “clone” your sim card, getting around that “infallible” two-factor text message authentication? It’s called SIM swapping. Hacking is a big problem, especially for the big tech companies. Take Cloudflare as an example. As one of the biggest reverse proxy web services out there, it’s estimated that nearly 10% of all internet traffic runs through their servers. That’s an insane amount. It also puts a huge hacker target on their back. So what’s their solution? 

Lava lamps. Yup. You read that right. Cloudflare uses lava lamps to help protect them from hackers and keep their systems (and everyone else’s) safe. 

 How? And Why? You’re probably asking…(well, I was!) 

 Randomness is the answer. Apparently, when it comes to encryption, randomness is the key. And computers are not very good at creating random sequences. That’s where the lava lamps come in. The “lava” in a lava lamp never takes the same shape twice, and therefore, lava lamps are a wonderful source of random data. Over 100 lava lamps are lined up along a wall, with a camera taking images at regular intervals.These images are uploaded to Cloudflare’s servers. Each pixel in the image has its own numerical value, and therefore the image itself is a completely random collection of unpredictable numerical data. Perfect as a starting point for creating encryption keys. Who knew that 65 years on, those gimmicky lamps from the 60’s would be protecting us from the dark side of the world wide web! 

 So how about you? Have you ever fallen prey to an internet attacker? Have you ever been hacked? I’d love to hear your stories…