TMCnet News
Online security is becoming a rather bad joke [Evening Standard (London, England)](Evening Standard (London, England) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) IDON'T know what your all-time highest score on Sonic the Hedgehog is. But I imagine it wouldn't be very difficult to find out, since Sega, the Japanese video game developer that invented the irritating blue urchin, recently suffered the theft of 1.3 million users' personal details from its Sega Pass online database. How? Well, the new old-fashioned way. A load of anarchic cyber- crims bust open a big company's vaults and made off with as much valuable gear as they could carry. Sega users' data is now circulating somewhere in the cybersphere, for the use or misuse of anyone who can be bothered to hang around on chat rooms sifting through porn and goatse long enough to find it. The past six weeks have seen a flurry of hacking activity. Hackers have yanked down the virtual underpants of numerous big corporations and government bodies. Sony and Nintendo have been robbed. CIA and the US Senate computer systems have been disrupted. Last week there was a data dump of 62,000 random email accounts and passwords stolen from users of Yahoo!, AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, Verizon, Gmail and others. Many recent hackings have been carried out by a collective known as Lulz Security, or LulzSec. (Lulz, for all you analogue cats out there, are what we used to call "shits and giggles".) Groups such as LulzSec create chaos and expose people's privacy because they think it's funny. Or, as they put it, because "watching someone's Facebook picture turn into a penis and seeing their sister's shocked response is priceless ... We release personal data so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it". I admit, I sniggered when I read that, since any mention of turning a Facebook picture into a man's winky appeals to my inner Beavis and Butthead. But there's also a serious point. The online world is moving unstoppably towards cloud-based computing, in which all your data, files and private personal information are stored on the servers of big corporations such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. We're not just talking about your Call of Duty password. It's everything. A handful of companies will hold vital data about everyone on earth, barring those few communities who haven't got into social networking or multiplayer Gears of War yet (ie just a few Polynesian tribes, one or two Amish Mennonites and my gran). That these companies have such slack defences is unacceptable. You wouldn't bank with NatWest if it was held up by the Joker every week. Why should you be expected to entrust your bank details, emails or holiday snaps to a company that can't protect you? The corporate world needs to tighten up its defences, fast. The first step should probably to hire LulzSec as security consultants. A handful of firms will hold data on everyone on earth, barring the few who haven't got into social networking yet (c) 2011 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved. |