IT Support

Personal Data Hacking – Online ID Theft

The recent hacking of Sony’s Playstation Network is the latest in a series of serious security breaches on high profile websites.

US marketing service Epsilon, which holds data for about 2,500 firms including Marks & Spencer and Barclaycard, also suffered an attack where millions of email addresses were stolen.

Online retailer Play.com has also had its data hacked exposing email addresses and personal information to cyber criminals.

In the biggest attack so far more than 77 million Sony PSN users had their personal information accessed and it is unsure whether credit card details were also taken.  In all cases the internet thieves were able to access email addresses.

Although this may seem trivial, email addresses are actually the key to our online world and if someone was able to access our email accounts and change the password they could wreak havoc with our lives.

Also, as people now need to remember their email address and password settings for dozens of different online applications, it is common for users to use the same password for them all.

Hackers do sell on personal information to other criminals and if one was to break through a person’s online security it is possible they could access bank details and social media accounts. They could even place innocent looking links on a Facebook wall or in an email to a friend which could then place spyware on their computers as well.

Breaching your internet password may also be easier than you think.  In early 2011 a Germany security researcher, Thomas Roth, claimed he was able to use Amazon’s cloud elastic computing service to crack a highly complex wi-fi code in 20 minutes, using what has been described as brute force tactics.

He was able to do this as the Amazon system allows users to increase their server power rapidly on demand, hence being called elastic, and he was able to test more than 40,000 passwords a second. It is believed the same method could test up to a million passwords a second.

These recent developments have caused it experts for security to warn consumers to beef up the complexity of their password settings. Some websites will now test the strength of passwords to show you which combinations work better against the software used to crack them.

Others commentators suggest lying about your date of birth, home town and former schools on social networking sites.

Research carried out by credit checker Experian showed that almost a quarter of people were willing to put their high school details on the internet but only 1 per cent would do it over the phone.

Identity theft has been a growing crime for some time and one which can be extremely messy and complicated to resolve if you become a victim. It can take months to clear up damage caused to credit ratings and it is much better to use preventative methods rather than a cure.

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