As I did my morning rounds of news websites yesterday, once again I found an article about another cyber attack on the Internet. Now, I don't really know what it all means, but I am aware that it has serious security breaches and can cause issues for millions of users around the world.
Our world has changed and we have grown into a very technological society. You can be anywhere in the world and gain access to your e-mail from a smartphone device. The power of technology is massive, we all know this. However, there seems to be an electronic war going on. We are all pretty oblivious to this as we are used to wars being carried out in the physical world with guns, tanks and bombs, not lines of code being pushed through clouds that interrupt or breakdown websites.
As a writer I began thinking about how this could possibly effect the spy/action genre. These so called 'bad guys' are not easy to find and hide behind elaborate firewalls on their computers not in elaborate underground lairs with sharks that have lasers attached. As well, the guys protecting the worlds servers are not driving around in Aston Martin's and sipping on Vodka Martini's, they are in office cubicles trying to manage thousands and thousands of lines of code. Kinda sounds like a pretty boring premise for a spy versus spy movie or book.
Sure, you could have people's servers going down and the mahem that could ensue, but the story would go something like this. Jack Knight (Cool spy name) then typed in 101101100110 and restored everyone's bank accounts to its previous state. He then sent several Trojan viruses back at their enemy and victory was won. Jack went home and played Call of Duty on his X-Box to celebrate. It was totally frickin' awesome!
It even gives a huge challenge to writers of video of games whose best games are about war with soldiers. Could someone produce a popular game that is about hacking computers or protecting them from hackers? Sounds pretty tedious and could get pretty old quick. Maybe need some really imaginative people to pull that one off.
I suppose we might see a really great movie or book come out soon from some really great writers that will explore this new digital war that is going on. Let's wait and see.
