It’s a bit of corporate espionage mixed with questions of journalistic ethics, maybe a great way for a few companies to gain free publicity, and it holds a good lesson about security for us all.
According to the New York Times BITS blog, Twitter has kept fairly quiet about their business plans as the world watched them become increasingly more popular. But recently, a hacker got access to confidential contracts, employee information and credit card numbers (eek!), office floor plans and security codes, and then sent at least some of the info to the industry blog TechCrunch, and another in France. Twitter users information wasn’t compromised though, which is good for business.
Hackers used to be just thieves, but now they’ve branched out to become the tabloid reporters of cyberspace, violating privacy and common decency for a juicy story with internet speed. These days, public figures whose personal info is fairly well known are targets. Like last September, when a hacker got into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account when she was running for vice president, by using her birthday and ZIP code and correctly answering the security question about where she met her spouse. Her personal e-mail messages were then published by the gossip site Gawker.
Blogs, because they generally aren’t governed by the same financial considerations as mainstream publications, aren’t held to their advertisers code of ethics. Journalists used to have a code, but it seems to have seriously degraded since the time when reporters didn’t mention President Roosevelt was in a wheelchair.
What does this mean for you? It means to take your personal security seriously. Because these hackers didn’t get past any high-tech security measures, they just correctly guessed the answers the personal questions that some sites use. And once they’re in, they can use your personal info with internet speed.
Tags: Internet Speed