Saturday, February 25, 2012
Do Us All a Favor, Be Secure
Neglecting to protect our own privacy can effect others. For two years, I used the same username and password to access my work email and my company's billing system. I then received an email from a friend who suggested that I change my email password because he had guessed it and had hacked into my account. There were emails in my inbox that contained links to my company's billing system. With those links, my username, and my password, he had access to the billing information of thousands of customers. He could have caused my company a huge headache by billing random customers hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, my friend meant well by hacking my account. He helped me realize that I had been a fool for not changing my passwords more often. My carelessness could have affected the security of others. Let us protect others by first protecting our own privacy.
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It is kind of scary to think what could happen if your account gets hacked.
ReplyDeleteTrue. Each individual email may not contain enough information for someone to do any damage, but someone with patience could find clues from multiple emails that, when pieced together, provide all of the information they need to steal your secrets.
ReplyDeleteSecurity is often misleading. Take passwords as an example: We've focused on securing ourselves with complex passwords of about the same length, when in reality adding another five-letter word might be more effective.
ReplyDeletehttp://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator
My Hotmail account got hacked a few years ago - I'm pretty sure it was someone from China because a lot of other Hotmail accounts also got hacked around the same time (by hackers from China). The account literally no longer receives e-mails...
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