Archive

Posts Tagged ‘TechCrunch’

How dependant are you to Internet?

July 16th, 2009

I was particularly interested with some headlines today.

Twitter’s @Ev Confirms Hacker Targeted Personal Accounts; Attack Was “Highly Distressing.”TechCrunch

Twitter Gets Hacked, BadlyTechCrunch (January 2009)

In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter DocumentsTechCrunch

Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents PostTechCrunch

Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch TechCrunch

Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013TechCrunch

Hackers embarrass Twitter yet againTheStar

Twitter, Even More Open Than We WantedTwitter Blog

Long story short, a hacker by the name of Hacker Croll was able to compromise the Twitter accounts of founder Evan Williams, his wife, and several employees. The hacker who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to some French forum and TechCrunch.

twitter-confidential

For TechCrunch, it is of valuable material as they claimed that “We don’t sit around and republish press releases, we break big stories.”. The level of ethics depends on the acceptance of individual or industry where in the case of TechCrunch, they have selected and published documents that do not refer to individuals (that could mean disaster to their career), but chose to only publish leaked documents representing Twitter as an organization.

Twitter eventually had a blog post that concluded the event as The ‘Underwear Drawer’ Analogy. Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they’re certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world. As Peter Kafka put it, this is “akin to having your underwear drawer rifled: Embarrassing, but no one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there.” That is an apt analogy.

What I’m trying to highlight in this post is that Twitter being hacked is beside the point.
That’s why this title is not Twitter got Hacked, again! 🙂
Any popular website would’ve had been hacked once a while, there are hackers who hack to prove they are great, there are those who hack to raise awareness and get people involved to upgrade their system’s security.

The point here is, how dependant are we to the Internet? Not as in people getting addicted or hooked to Internet for games or chat.

The victims of hacking got their online account compromised, and documents including salary, credit card details, photos, plans, confidential documents, and most importantly passwords to other online services. (Think : Underwear type of items). You get embarrassed when they are shown to the public.
Note: Most people have the same password for all online websites/service.

So when the hacker got the Twitter account, he/she got their Google Apps account and also credit card, eBay, PayPal, etc. So what do you have in your emails?

I bet those emails contain loads of useful information to other prying eyes as well, don’t you think?

However, we have reached the era where we are too dependant to Internet. You have online banking, online photo sharing, online mail service, online social service etc.
What if one fine day you have your account suspended and you have no way to recover your data?
What if you have all your photos in Flickr, Picasa or Facebook removed.
What if all your emails are non-accessible?
What if you have trouble remembering all your accounts (id or passwords)?

Do you have a backup of our online data offline?
The world has shifted from paper to paperless to desktop computing to cloud computing.

Yes, you might argue that you choose to use sizable companies like Google. I’d still say the risk is there, and we are depending on them more and more.

How independent are we or how dependant are you to Marvellous Internet?

Computer Security, Good To Know, Gossips, Internet, Technology , , , ,