Last month one of our lead articles was Cyber Security: Forewarned is Fair-Warned.
Last week the New York Times published an article reporting that at least 1.2 billion usernames and passwords were hacked by a Russian cybercrime group by the name of CyberVor from upwards of 420,000 distinct web sites.
A very interesting CNN article on cyber security acknowledges the breach, identifies Hold Security as the company that found the hack and suggests they may have a commercial interest in the hack report. To all of this the CNN author Chester Wisniewski says: Yeah, so?
Wisniewski suggests that Hold Security is provoking internet users to panic and rush to change all their passwords, or better yet to accept its offer to let you know if you’ve been hacked for a mere $120 apiece. He goes on to suggest that the cyber security criminals only have cryptic representations of the passwords, or partial passwords at that.
Weighing In. Either way, isn’t it about time you undertook a regular routine of changing your passwords? Particularly those that have access to information that you would just as soon not share with the world? At the very least, let’s all use different passwords depending upon the importance of the access… and get rid of “password123”!