This is just a reminder to resist buying deeply discounted online services:
From Krebs on Security: "Buying heavily discounted, popular software from second-hand sources online has always been something of an iffy security proposition. But purchasing steeply discounted licenses for cloud-based subscription products like recent versions of Microsoft Office can be an extremely risky transaction, mainly because you may not have full control over who has access to your data." Read the rest of the article at the Krebs website. Huh. This is a big data breach. If I'm reading it correctly, it's data on 81,934,021 Americans in total. I'm not sure if that second data set is just part of the first.
Of course it was a data aggregation company. They use bots, crawlers and spiders to trawl the internet for information on people. Then they collate it. Then they sell it to sketch companies who use it to robo call our cell phones or send us spam. Or time shares. 😫 This is from the article: "...56,934,021 US citizens, with information such as first name, last name, employers, job title, email, address, state, zip, phone number, and IP address" ... "Another index of the same database contained more than 25 million records with more of a “Yellow Pages” details directory: name, company details, zip address, carrier route, latitude/longitude, census tract, phone number, web address, email, employees count, revenue numbers, NAICS codes, SIC codes, and etc." I've been thinking a lot about how much information is online about all of us. There's a huge temptation to throw caution to the wind and just let it happen. Give various companies like Facebook, Google, Twitch, Yahoo or Twitter all the information they're grasping for despite all the warning bells in our heads. It's sort of like being in the path of a speeding train and knowing that you will never get out of the way fast enough. It's kind of accepting the certainty of a death. For us older folks, it's the death of privacy in a big way. We used to take it for granted that there was a major amount of time and work put into getting all of our information in one place. It usually involved trips to the library, the courthouse where we grew up and where we currently live. We also depended on officials to guard our documents. The DMV didn't release our address and info all willy-nilly. Our home ownership documents were accessible, but you had to ask an actual person to get them for you. The same was true for marriage licenses. You could purchase an unlisted phone number. Relatives were yours to disclose or not. Now? Look yourself up online. It's all there. The data aggregation companies are just collators. They just help other companies make the data work for them. This is an intense topic and one that bothers me a lot. Click on the image to go to the article at the HackenProof blog. |
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