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PlayStation User? Kill The Cat!
Today we hear confirmation about a breach of the Sony Playstation Network with the loss of millions of account names and personal details and potentially the loss of payment card details such as the payment card number and Expiry dates, but excluding the security code.
The type of data rumoured lost includes names, addresses, email addresses, account names, account passwords, relevant date of birth and answers to security questions. By security questions one presumes the questions would be of a similar type to: What is the name of your pet?
So should we be concerned?
Well if I was one of the potential victims of this theft I would be. Why? Because the amount of personal data which has been supposedly taken would allow a fraudster to start to take over my identity. Much of the rumoured stolen data can be used to authenticate and validate a user, particularly when that user claims to have forgotten the usual authentication tokens such as passwords and passphrases.
The problems arise because we humans are quite forgetful of our authentication details such as passwords. This means we tend to use the same passwords for multiple systems or at the very least similar passwords for similar systems. When we use random passwords then we tend to forget them. The systems we inter-operate with are aware of this and see this forgetfulness as a real inhibitor to them being able to validate and interact with us. They are also aware that the loss of authentication could lead to the loss of a sale or provision of a service. However they know that we remember personal details much better, so questions related to address, dates and favourite or personal facts become a fallback authentication process for the service provider. Unfortunately this also means this personal information becomes far more valuable to a hacker as well.
Only recently I was with a family member who was paying for some items on an ecommerce website. As often occurs these days, as part of the card authentication process she was taken to a 3D secure card authentication screen where she suddenly found she couldn't remember her secure password.
Helpfully the bank in question gave her the option to select "Forgotten password?" and she was then validated by being asked for her date of birth. Once validated by this information, the password was permitted to be reset.
Similarly most on-line applications will provide the capability to retrieve forgotten or lost passwords by asking for personal information such as date of birth, address or some well-known security questions, such as name of pet, birth place etc. - which just happens to sound familiar. The problem is that much of this data can't be changed - it's easy to change a compromised password, but how do you change a compromised date of birth ?
So if I was one of the potentially compromised users in the Sony Playstation network I'd be working very hard today to change any account details which used the same or similar account names and passwords, thinking about changing my email address and I'd either kill the cat, or at least renaming her!
Free anonymizing proxies are readily available all over the Internet. There are shows that you install on your computer to access these proxies as well as there are proxies that you can access over a webpage.
VPN services use sophisticated technologies to provide anonymity and information protection for users. They make it possible for users in foreign nations to accessibility content that might be restricted.
On home computer networks, info can easily be protected by encryption. Encryption indicates changing the data by having a scrambled strand of nonsense.
VPN services are extremely common and there are quite a couple different providers offering you various variations of them. Of course, this begs the question: Why would I even require one of these services?
VPN services provide a method to protect the privacy. The fascinating thing regarding exactly how these networks work is that the privacy security carries out additional than you may think initially.
During this holiday season, is it better to give or receive? For identity thieves, it's neither; they prefer to take; and their latest hunting ground for victims is Facebook. Having surpassed 800 million users worldwide, there is plenty of targets on Facebook for crooks to go after. Knowing how they go about their schemes will help you be more informed about protecting yourself on Facebook.
Today we hear confirmation about a breach of the Sony Playstation Network with the loss of millions of account names and personal details and potentially the loss of payment card details such as the payment card number and Expiry dates, but excluding the security code.
Why is it: whenever there is a breach of a company's security it is always attributed to the work of sophisticated cyber criminals? Is this because it really does take a sophisticated criminal to breach an environment these days or do victims prefer to characterise the cleverness of the criminal rather than the weakness of the security environment?
Transponder keys becoming more and more technically advanced. The keys provide a signal between the key and the lock By using transponder keys and locks you can help prevent auto theft.
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