Difference between revisions of "Hacking security"

Targets and Attacks

Government Services

Recently, sixty million users were affected due to the weak security for USPS website. This led to exposure to its database that consisted of emails to phone numbers, mailing campaign data, social security numbers, possibly credit card numbers, access to request account changes for other users so they make changes to the email addresses and phone numbers of other users, access to street addresses, who lived in each residence, and data of everyone who lived in the same household as those who logged into the site. This data breach took this organization a year to resolve these problems. In other words, these issues were aware of but not fixed right away. ^[3]

One wouldn’t have expected such high vulnerability considering that USPS is part of the government and one would hope it's more secure than expected. This leads to a concern of ethics and safety. One should be concerned that its possible for the “hackers” to gain access to other branches of the government as this was too vulnerable to access.

Healthcare

Unfortunately, healthcare companies are easy targets in terms of hacking because it's maximized vulnerability. It can easily take weeks or months before one realizes there is a data breach. This allows too much allotted time for hackers to access as much information as they want or need. This type of information contains social security numbers and dates of births as companies only spend 3% of their IT budget on security. ^[4]

One would assume that healthcare companies would contribute more funds towards security as there is so much prevalent information that both medical professionals and clients need. It makes one wonder why these companies are still vulnerable and not respecting idea of anonymity and keeping information discreet. Most people wouldn’t want their medical conditions or health related information exposed the public as they may be embarrassed or are hiding it for professional or personal reasons. Example, one may not want their job to know they are battling cancer in fear of losing their job and not having financial security for the medical treatments.

Ethnics and Anonymity

Anonymity defined as unable to coordinate some known trait(s) with other traits such that the person can’t be identified. This is something that many people in the US don’t have the flexibility of. Many of the attacks and examples reflect that people are no longer anonymous or have the least amount of people with access to certain personal information. Because of the lack of, or limited security across many organizations and companies, this has led to the vulnerability and exposure of personal information.

It is clear based on data breaches that occurred for the US Postal Services and Healthcare companies reflect how rare anonymity is. Exposure of social security numbers will potentially lead to many identity thefts which often take a long time to recover from. Due to the exposure from the data breach,, it’s possible that more than one person will have that identity which makes it that much harder to track down the person who actually “stole” one’s identity.

Alessandro Acquisti shares how there is no such thing as hiding your secrets or being anonymous because of our online era.The truth is; from having an image of a person using facial recognition, finding a name and publicly information about that name and person can form into non-publicly available information even the more sensitive information. Example, using one’s image found on their Facebook account or an app that uses phone’s internal camera taking images of user and the information shared on Facebook led to more help for determining their social security number. With these tools, there is a 27% chance of determining their first five SSN digits within four attempts. This is just one of his many experiments in regards to anonymous and how to gather information to uncover their information. ^[5]

Based on Acquisti’s claims in regards to how it’s becoming easier to discover more personal information about people. However, these data breaches don’t help considering we are already vulnerable to these security concerns. These data breaches along with the online presence of people makes it that much harder for people to remain anonymous or limit their anonymity from the least amount of people as possible.

Conclusion

Overall, one can suggest that it's prevalent for companies to become more serious in terms of online security as one will have personal information that can potentially not be retrieved once its been exposed. It’s necessary that companies maximize their budget and efforts to ensure the safety of their online users to avoid or limit the number of data breaches if this is possible. This would be useful as people are already sharing minimal information online with the lack of awareness that no one is truly anonymous and there is a small chance of one finding more personal information about them.

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