LulzSec: Putting the tragicomedy into insecurity

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 20 June 2011 18:05

Opinion and Analysis

With LulzSec, Anonymous and other hackers good and bad showing how 'Internet Security' can so easily be shortened to 'insecurity', the on-going and ever more alarming security wake-up call is ringing louder and louder, but what good is that when so many have put their phones to silent?

With LulzSec reaching their 1000th tweet and releasing an open letter to the 'Internets' at PasteBin, cyber insecurity in 2011 has certainly come a long way since the early days of Stoned viruses, Morris worms and emails proclaiming love.

Companies are surely now scrambling to ensure they don't end up the next hacked headline, complete with masses of customer data plastered all over the Internet, courtesy of LulzSec, Anonymous or the next  ROFL33t-haxxor-squad to gain instant fame and notoriety on the 'nets.

However, with the never-ending stories of new hack attacks in the media, and plenty of consumers around the world personally suffering the loss of password, financial and other info security, perhaps the wake-up call is finally getting through, although still not quickly enough.

When it comes to security on the Internet, the war has become a guerrilla war, with the hackers taking out and/or messing with targets just for fun, as LulzSec has admitted, and watching the carnage unfold. 

LulzSec says that it is, at the very least, telling us what it is doing, thus giving us all fair warning that this is occurring right now, by lots of different people out there - not just LulzSec.

It's certainly a great wake-up call to every person reading this right now to change your passwords for every single site you use, to never use the same password twice, and to make sure that your passwords are as complex as possible, with upper and lower case letters, with numbers, and if possible, with a character, like a dollar, hash, tilde, asterisk, percentage sign or other symbol.

Instead of storing your passwords on your computer, you could store them on your smartphone, but with malware on smartphones too, your data can be stolen from anywhere!

It's the perfect cloud service for cybercriminals - everything that's connected is a potential target.

Nowadays, massive online databases are kept by all kinds of huge companies and other organisations. Inside are usernames, passwords and other details, and the security with which these details are being guarded is regularly proving to be wildly insufficient.

There are companies who aren't fully up-to-date with the latest security patches, fixes and updates, others that don't keep passwords in an encrypted format, or not highly encrypted enough, while others still fall prey to Kevin Mitnick-style human social engineering attacks.

Continued on page two, please read on!