This may be bad news but it’s not the end of the world. There’s no need to push the panic button.
You may have read that the NSA have reportedly inserted spyware on the hard drives made by top manufacturers like Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, etc – ie. the hard drives in literally every computers in the world. This global surveillance exercise, discovered by Moscow-based security software Kaspersky Lab, mainly targeted “government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activist” mainly in countries like Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria.
Now even if you’re not within that circumscribed range of victims, the fact remains that every computers can be compromised. But there are ways to circumvent the risks – you can never eliminate such risks but you can always minimize the impacts.
As I have pointed out in my public lectures, there are some simple tricks to protect your data (and your life if you’re an entrepreneur because your data is everything to your livelihood) even if you’re not an IT geek. One good practice is to never store a single file or doc, apart from the software and operating system, on your computer hard disk. And I’m not suggesting using the cloud given the well publicized risks. I meant storing your files on an external encrypted hard disk.
And together with several other simple tricks that I’ve shared publicly (for example, consider how you connect your devices online, when you should connect/disconnect the external hard drives to the computer…), there are indeed ways to protect your computers and data.