With all the impending doom outside, we know there are better things to do than sit and contemplate hurricanes, which is why we completed our storm preparations first! Now that business is taken care of, we’ve decided to embrace our hurricane-brain and compare hackers to hurricanes. They have more in common than you think!

1. They have unique names that are hard to forget. There can only be one Andrew or Anonymous, whose names we remember long after their damage is done. Much like the tropical cyclone naming system that forecasters use to give hurricanes their names, hacker groups also have a method for choosing their names, although it’s more clever than it is scientific.
2. They both brute force attack. Whether it’s a hacker using the knowledge in his or her head to crack code, build a virus, or lift information from servers, or a hurricane exerting her raw power on the Earth, they both define brute force attack.
3. They move quickly. Sandy is headed up the east coast at 25 mph with winds at a high of 90 mph. Melissa, a computer virus created by David Smith in 1999 took out 300 company computers and 100,000 email users within hours of her release.
4. They sometimes travel in groups. It’s not uncommon to turn on The Weather Channel and see a cluster of tropical storms with hurricane potential out in the middle of the ocean. Nor is it uncommon for hackers to form a group to make themselves more effective and powerful in a strike.
5. They have the ability to produce massive physical damage. Hurricanes take the cake when it comes to producing massive physical damage, which is often life threatening. Sandy is expected to be catastrophic and has already taken 65 lives. While hackers take more interest in your money, not your life, they also have the ability to produce massive physical damage, as proven by “Stuxnet”, the bug that destroyed the Iranian centrifuges.
6. The best defense is to be prepared. With both hackers and hurricanes, the best-case scenario is to simply heed warnings and prepare as best as you can. Often by the time the storm gets here, or the hacker has attacked, it’s too late to do anything else. To make sure you’re fully prepared for Sandy, click here.