Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Like many companies, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) decided to use AI as its customer support chatbot (instead of humans). It resulted in a ridiculously easy way to hack Instagram accounts (Meta/Facebook owns Instagram).   So easy that even a layman can understand it (and be shocked). Hackers who wanted to hack anyone’s Insta account would initiate a chat with the AI support bot and ask for the email ID associated with the account be updated. The AI would do it, no questions asked! Then the hacker would initiate a password reset request on the target account. An OTP-like verification code would be sent to the associated email ID (But remember, this is now the mail ID that the hacker had changed via the chat bot). He’d enter the verification code, and bingo! Password reset and the Insta account had been hacked. “The attack did not rely on sophisticated malware, zero-day exploits or technical vulnerabilities in Instagram itself. Instead, attackers manipulated the AI system t...

I have played a fair amount of Atari video games as a kid, but I never became a game junkie/addict. And yet I found this Michael Thomsen article on cheating in video games very interesting and thought provoking. But first, let’s be clear what does not constitute online game cheating. In many online games, you could play them the old fashioned way (advancing by your skills). Or you could pay the game maker to get extra lives or to increase your farm produce or to skip levels! (In case you’re wondering, most such games are free and such purchases are the way the game makers make money. It’s just a different business model). But at least those games were designed with such options in mind and everyone knows that some of the others would be employing such techniques. So what about games where cheat codes were never intended to be part of the game? Your instinctive reaction about using such cheat codes might be, to quote Johan Huizinga: “as soon as the rules are transgressed...