The recent 'trend' of hackings carried out against various companies...
To all those who have noticed (or more likely not), dissertation time came around meaning this blog has been rather neglected. So apologies firstly for that.
Moving on, the main topic of this post (which has been floating around my mind for some time) is towards, as I see it, the recent 'trend' of notable/major companies websites or services being hacked. Since the turn of the year, the number of website hacking happening to various companies has become a worrying trend. I had the delight of having to cancel my debit card after being told by Lush Cosmetics (I used them to get a Christmas present for my girlfriend, I swear :p) that their whole website had been compromised and all credit card details and the like had been taken. A few weeks later, I was then contacted by play.com informing me that I was more than likely about to receive more spam than I already do because all their customer contact details (held on a company affiliated to them I must add) had been hacked. The Lush hacking gained a reasonable amount of press interest purely because some customers (they may not be anymore) actually had money stolen from their accounts.
An interesting article by Davey Winder (in PC Pro Issue 199, which links to the online article at: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/199security) is quite damning of the company and highlights the vulnerability of companies who are unable to afford greater online security. The bigger companies, such as Amazon and play.com seem a lot more capable of resisting such in-depth attacks, although Amazon were subject to DDoS attacks last September by the Anonymous group.
However, nothing compares in magnitute to the on-going situation over at Sony, which really does take the biscuit. Roughly 77 million people's details compromised and still no answers yet. If something on this scale is possible then one wonders what, or whom, is next. Personally, having an Xbox Live gold membership, I would like to think with the amount of money people have to plough into Microsoft to use this service that they would be able to cope better than the free PSN has done. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be surprised if something did happen (in my experience of Microsoft related things).
To finish this post, I wonder if the people who hacked into the PSN left this as little calling card....
Moving on, the main topic of this post (which has been floating around my mind for some time) is towards, as I see it, the recent 'trend' of notable/major companies websites or services being hacked. Since the turn of the year, the number of website hacking happening to various companies has become a worrying trend. I had the delight of having to cancel my debit card after being told by Lush Cosmetics (I used them to get a Christmas present for my girlfriend, I swear :p) that their whole website had been compromised and all credit card details and the like had been taken. A few weeks later, I was then contacted by play.com informing me that I was more than likely about to receive more spam than I already do because all their customer contact details (held on a company affiliated to them I must add) had been hacked. The Lush hacking gained a reasonable amount of press interest purely because some customers (they may not be anymore) actually had money stolen from their accounts.
An interesting article by Davey Winder (in PC Pro Issue 199, which links to the online article at: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/199security) is quite damning of the company and highlights the vulnerability of companies who are unable to afford greater online security. The bigger companies, such as Amazon and play.com seem a lot more capable of resisting such in-depth attacks, although Amazon were subject to DDoS attacks last September by the Anonymous group.
However, nothing compares in magnitute to the on-going situation over at Sony, which really does take the biscuit. Roughly 77 million people's details compromised and still no answers yet. If something on this scale is possible then one wonders what, or whom, is next. Personally, having an Xbox Live gold membership, I would like to think with the amount of money people have to plough into Microsoft to use this service that they would be able to cope better than the free PSN has done. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be surprised if something did happen (in my experience of Microsoft related things).
To finish this post, I wonder if the people who hacked into the PSN left this as little calling card....
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