The article cites thegrugq, the author of several practical guides to protecting yourself from hacking. He points out that, “Security is a trade-off against efficiency” and that it can be difficult to make the additional effort when consequences seem remote or unlikely.
But if the hack of AshleyMadison…and Adobe.com…and even the website for Dominos Pizza…tells us anything, the chance of being hacked is no longer remote (check Have I Been Pwned? to see if you already have been). Now is a good time to reconsider what the right level of operational security is for you—and implement it, consistently.
Future Crimes exposes the ways criminals, corporations and countries are using new and emerging technologies against you – and how this makes you more vulnerable than you ever imagined.
Here are two excerpts that stand out:
If you don’t own and control your own online persona, it’s extremely easy for a criminal to aggregate the known information about you and use it for a wide variety of criminal activity, ranging from identity theft to espionage. Indeed, there are many such examples of this occurring, especially for high-profile individuals.
The more data you produce, the more organized crime is happy to consume. Many social media companies have been hacked, including LinkedIn (6.5 million accounts), Snapchat (4.6 million names and phone numbers), Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Transactional crime groups are responsible for a full 85% of those data breaches, and their goal is to extract the greatest amount of data possible , with the highest value in the cyber underground.
In 2013, the data broker Experian mistakenly sold the personal data of nearly two-thirds of all Americans to an organized crime group in Vietnam. The massive breach occurred because Experian failed to do due diligence.
Goodman concludes Future Crimes with an appendix of tips that will help readers avoid more than 85 percent of the digital threats that they face each day. (Turning off your computer at night is one.) Reading the book will help you understand why they are so important.
No company wants to be put in the position of Sony: hacked, with thousands of valuable internal documents published widely online. But the proliferation of hacking and the ease with which even government databases can be accessed makes it clear that there is very little security on the Internet.
This crisis presents one more important lesson. While we have little control over our Internet security, we can control what we say online, including in emails. We can:
– Be brief.
– Stick to the facts.
– Avoid acknowledging, participating in or responding to conversations that would be embarrassing or harmful to us or others if made public.
– Pick up the phone when you want to keep a conversation private.
The immediacy and convenience of email communication can make it difficult to adopt those guidelines. But they represent a large step for safer online discussions, something we should all strive for.
