“Hackers have exposed the personal information of 110 million Americans — roughly half of the nation’s adults — in the last 12 months alone,” Jose Pagliery reports for CNNMoney.
“That massive number, tallied for CNNMoney by Ponemon Institute researchers, is made even more mind-boggling by the amount of hacked accounts: up to 432 million,” Pagliery reports. “The damage is real. Each record typically includes personal information, such as your name, debit or credit card, email, phone number, birthday, password, security questions and physical address.”
“It’s enough to get hunted down by an abusive ex-spouse. It makes you an easier target for scams. And even if only basic information about you is stolen, that can easily be paired with stolen credit card data, empowering impostors,” Pagliery reports. “‘It’s becoming more acute,’ said Larry Ponemon, head of the Ponemon Institute. ‘If you’re not a data breach victim, you’re not paying attention.’ So, get accustomed to the hack of the month. In April, that was AOL. In May, it was eBay. Who knows what June will bring?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier today, one major component to the problem is that some people use one password for everything they do online and, when one thing gets compromised (eBay, for example), everything else is also accessible to criminals.
Use unique passwords and Apple’s Keychain Access and iCloud Keychain to create and manage them. When used properly, it works like a dream.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Apple: iCloud not compromised in Apple ID ransom scheme – May 28, 2014
Oh sure, but the good news is that half of U.S. adults weren’t hacked. Stupid negative media. 😉
You mean the half that don’t have credit cards?
100% actually. Given that Snowden said the NSA is keeping various records on everyone who uses any electronic communication device, plus you can figure they have access to all your IRS records…
What ought to get people riled up is that our government has mandated collection of all medical data under one system, and your SSA account info, which means they have your bank & asset info, too.
This applies for adults and then even kids from the Common Core initiative and Obamacare for all your medical records (including whether you own a gun.)
Hense, the US Government has already instituted the surveillance state before the average person even realizes it happened.
Citizens will either vote back against these trends or they will become the Eloi.
So US only? other countries not affected?
Typical American-centric media doesn’t seem to think the rest of the world exists.
Apple Keychain is nice… but is vulnerable to visibility from other people with privileges on your computer.
I have been using 1Password for many years, and it has made unique, secure passwords easy. Highly recommended.
My understanding from Rumors is that thumbprint ID for hardware will become the norm in all next generation hardware of all types.
I would argue it is just as easily possible to do eye scans in the near future for access to all hardware, given the ubiquitous user facing cameras now.
I heard Samsung is switching to sphincter id.
yeah, just shove your phat phone up there, where it belongs
Did you ASSume that? 😉
I wonder what type of computers were hacked. It is both stupid and irresponsible to not define this.
Often last year, it was just a users data on some retailer’s servers.
Yes, but what servers?
You can probably guess what my presumption would be about what servers – but I have no actual information. I’m curious.
“what type of computers were hacked”
You have “no actual information” because you didn’t bother, actually reading the article did you?
You big wally.
I read it. Did you?
XP is mentioned as in, “it doesn’t help that”. It doesn’t specifically state that XP was the OS involved in these particular massive hacks. I mean what were the specific OSs on these computers that were hacked?
Mostly through debit/cc terminals at retail…. like the Target hack. I know in recent history my card was compromised at Target, Michaels, and the Adobe hack.
The Target hack alone was 40 million people.
I got hacked off just reading this article.
That they know of…
If DropBox or iCloud become compromised, they will have… Well encrypted data, but given time won’t they have all your passwords?
1Password uses an unknown key tied to a known password… then runs it through 1000 to 10,000 cycles, I am assuming re-encryption, that produces an automatic delay, between brut force password guesses. If a wrong password is used, you won’t know it for at least a second, so brut force would take until the end of the universe. However I am still dubious to this security.
Google/NASA, specifically Google, claims they have a working quantum computer.
How is it, that we can actually protect ourselves?
“Google/NASA, specifically Google, claims they have a working quantum computer.”
Our Lady of Perpetual Beta doesn’t have a working quantum computer. In the research going on in various countries, quantum computing has been used so far to carry out amazing tasks such as factoring the number 21. Another project got the right answer to simple operations in an astounding 95% of cases.
We are, supposedly, only five or ten years off. I remember (when ah wuz young) the excitement about moving from macroscopic chip architectures to protein nets where the on/off locations were single electrons held at net junctions. That was supposedly in the imminent future. And that was something like thirty years ago.
So I should change my common password of 12345? I even use that on my luggage.
🙂
How many unique users have been hacked? It may be the same 10 million of cyber-dolts counted a dozen times. Less good of a headline, though.