Apple Co-Founder: Cybercrime is World’s Greatest Threat

 Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes the attack on cybersecurity is the world’s greatest threat.

Wozniak, or The Woz as he is popularly known has stated that cyberattacks and hacking are the world’s biggest threats.

ABC News in Australia reports quotes from Wozniak who compared cybercrime to the paranoia of the cold war era which saw the threat of the atomic bomb.

Wozniak stated:

We used to fear the atomic bomb when I was young, and you used to come home from school and sirens would go off for a test on every corner.

Now, we fear all the cyber attacks and hacking. What’s the next one we’re going to hear about?

The popular Apple veteran also believes that the cybersecurity is getting “worse and worse year by year, not better and better.”

The inventor and engineer, who developed Apple’s earliest computers along with Steve Jobs, said, “What’s the next one (cyberattack) we’re going to hear about? Is one gonna come close to me? Is it going to hit me? Could they really take out our electrical system, turn off our internet?”

Wozniak also stated it wasn’t right for the FBI to demand Apple unlock the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. He too, is against the creation of a custom ROM or operating system sought by the government to unlock the iPhone.

“What if the FBI was able to go to any company, any time they felt like it and said you have to build a product our way?,” he said before adding “I don’t think that’s right.”

Wozniak believes that ultimately, the important facet of  the development of cybersecurity should see computers and products that are secure.

If a custom version of an operating system did have the means to decrypt and unlock a phone, any phone for that matter, “the hackers are gonna do it too,” Wozniak stated flatly.

Wozniak met Steve Jobs in the 1970s to create Apple Computers before leaving in the 1980s. The computer wiz is now a professor at the University of Technology, Sydney.

 Image credit: Wikimedia.