Page 9 - Software Engineer

to steal the information. They created Blu-ray DVDs, for example,
which have encoded data that make it harder to illegally copy the
content. Systems engineers can also create firewalls and secu-
rity checks to make sure only authorized people have access.
This is very important in the military, for example, where classified
information can only be accessed by people who have software-
secured identification badges that grant them admission to physi-
cally secured areas.

Staying One Step Ahead

Keeping company information safe from hackers is often high on a
business owner’s priority list. Data breaches, hacking, and cyber-
attacks are on the rise, making a software engineer’s job crucial.
Ben Kepes of the technology magazine Network World reports,
“There is a continuing escalation in both the size and frequency
of attacks . . . an average of 124,000 events per week over the
last 18 months and a 73 percent increase in peak attack size over
2015.” The only way for companies to keep their information safe
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is to hire software engineers to develop hack-proof programs.
Engineers must implement these programs one step ahead
of the hackers. In late 2016, for example, software engineers cre-
ated a program called Shuffler to constantly scramble code as
a program runs, which makes it much more difficult for hackers
to execute a cyberattack. “Shuffler makes it nearly impossible to
turn a bug into a functioning attack, defending software devel-
opers from their mistakes,” says the study’s lead author, David
Williams-King, an engineering graduate student at Columbia Uni-
versity. “Attackers are unable to figure out the program’s layout if
the code keeps changing.” 9
In 2014 one of the largest-ever IT attacks was reported at
a German steel mill. Workers were targeted with booby-trapped
e-mails, and once the perpetrators got insider access to the
business network, hackers were able to burrow into the control
systems network that operated the equipment on the produc-
tion floor. The hackers’ interference caused a furnace to catch
fire, resulting in major property damage. Equipment failed and mill
workers were unable to quickly understand, contain, or stop the

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