Week-11 Blog

7 Ways to Avoid Identity Theft Before Facebook Gets Hacked
 

This article “7 ways to avoid identity theft before Facebook get hacked” by Adam Levin, talks about the ways you can protect yourself from being hacked or lose your valuable information from Facebook.  The article starts with a statement from Mark Zuckerberg who stated that “the age of privacy is over” and I think he meant it. There is no more privacy in Facebook and people don’t care it as long as they are updated with the information from family and friends. The article also states that Facebook is built to get personal information from users to better sell ads which are another truth about Facebook since billions of people spent so much time on it.   It is always good to be part of group and get lost of birthday wishes. That is why people put their birth day in Facebook and don’t realize that it could lead to identity theft and security breach. The last you want to know is your information is on a wrong hand for a wrong purpose.

For all these risk associated with using Facebook, the author mentioned several ways to avoid identity theft before your Facebook account gets hacked. He also states that having several Facebook account could help protect identity theft by confusing the hackers with pieces of information here and there. According to him, if you don’t want to have several accounts to protect yourself from hacking, here are some steps that could help:

1.       Having a different name in Facebook could help a big deal. Just tweaking the name a little might confuse the hacker to know who you are.

2.       Another important step you can take to protect yourself is to not tag your picture with location on it. So turning off the location services on the phone will stop hackers find out where you live or where you at.

3.       You don’t have to put your real age in Facebook. The least you could do is not include the birth year.

4.       Never store your credit card information in Facebook.   

5.       Have some boundaries before posting any information in Facebook. Set your privacy controls so that only the people you intend to share can view your postings.

6.       The less you post, the more peace of mind for you. Bragging stuffs in Facebook might only help bring you to the hacker’s attention.

7.       The last thing you could do to protect yourself with all the hassle s to deactivate your account.

I totally agree with the author's viewpoint in this article. It’s up to the users to activate or deactivate their Facebook account but it’s really necessary for them to think before posting anything in Facebook which might lead to having personal information stolen and used for something you don’t want to happen.

References:

Levin, A. (2013, Feb 7). 7 Ways to Avoid Identity Theft Before Facebook Gets Hacked. Retrieved May 22, 2015 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-levin/7-ways-to-avoid-identity_b_2634967.html

Week-10 Blog

China Blamed for Penn State Breach

This article talks about the breach that happened at the Penn State University, College of Engineering which suffered two sophisticated cyber-attacks with at least one originating from China. The hackers were not detected for two years due the evasion techniques the hackers employed. It was in September 12, when the attacks occurred with one of the attack originated in China. The university exposed the breaches on May 15 even though the FBI notified the school of attacks in November 21.

According to the article, as stated by Penn State, both data and personally identifiable information are safe. However, it was concluded that number of user names and passwords for the university issued accounts are compromised. It was also notified that around 18000 student’s PII might have been compromised so the university is offering a free credit monitoring for those students for a year.

As mentioned in the article, they might never know the specific methods the hackers used to entry the system but custom malware and other tactics was used to infect the network. As stated in the article, publicize of attacks was intentionally delayed so that the hackers are unaware of the efforts that been applied to fight the cyber-attack. The hackers were trying to target the intellectual property of the engineering department. Because all these large research universities deal with lots of development of sensitive technology related to the department of defense, they become attractive to China to get information on those research. All those who got compromised during the attack were required to change the password on their university account while faculty and staff who has remotes access to the system from a private network are required to use two-factor authentication to log in to the system.

References:

Chabrow, E. (2015, May 15). China Blamed for Penn State Breach. Retrieved on May 15, 2015 from http://www.databreachtoday.com/china-blamed-for-penn-state-breach-a-8230

Week-9 Blog

32 Date Breaches Larger than Sony’s in the past year

This article talks about the data breaches that happened last year. Sony suffered a huge loss and a large volume of their data leaked which includes their internal documents with their employee’s information. In addition to that, information about the actors and copies of several unreleased movies which cause them a huge loss because their movies were refused to play in so many theatres.

Apparently, that breach was not even within the top 30 breaches that happened last year. Sony breach was ranked at 33^rd in terms of number of records breached. EBay was in number one who suffered the largest data breach in terms of records with more than 150 million records compromised. J.P Morgan chase ranked second while losing 76 million records. Home Depot, Community Health Systems, Michaels Stores, Texas Health and Human Services, Neiman Marcus, Goodwill industries international, Oregon Employment Department, work source Oregon, U. S. Postal Service were within the top ten business who suffered a huge loss data and valuable information. Hacking or malware was the type of breach used to steal the data of these organizations.

References:

McCarthy, K. (2015, January 8). 32 Data Breaches Larger Than Sony’s in the Past Year. Retrieved May 7, 2015 from

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kyle-mccarthy/32-data-breaches-larger-t_b_6427010.html