You can’t make this stuff up. It really would be interesting to know who’s behind the Sony Breach.
Seriously. Could you even make these stories up?
Sony comes clean. They admit that 77 million records were compromised.
In its official statement, Sony recommends, “If you use the same user name or password for your PlayStation Network or Qriocity service account for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly advise that you change them.”
Wired’s take on who may have perpetrated the attack.
It makes me wonder: has my personal information been involved in a data breach more than the one time I’ve been told about? How far do I have to go to find someone who has? 77 million!? That’s about a 1/4 of the entire United States! I started thinking about the 6 degrees of separation and how far I would need to crawl my network to find an acquaintance that had their personal information pilfered.
I wondered if anyone else had asked the question. Kevin Beaver’s post led me to this great Chronology of Data Breaches. 598,410,625 RECORDS BREACHED from 2,451 DATA BREACHES made public since 2005. Data breaches made public. It has been reported that in 2009 40% of the breaches reported did not include the number of records breached. One also must assume there is a very large percentage (75% + ?)of breaches that have never been reported. That logic can quickly get you 4 billion records breached, since 2005. You don’t need 6 degrees to find someone! If it’s not your good self who has been a victim, the next person you see has probably been affected!
Password management is a real problem. Many users have a rotation of 2 or 3 passwords they regularly use for all their credentialed accounts. The password for social networking sites may be the same as the one for the banking site. Do not do this! And if we needed an example of why a password for shopping site should not be common to other passwords we use… thank you Sony. If you are a Sony customer, change your account passwords immediately.
UPDATE: May 3rd, Sony revealed another 24.6 million records ahad been breached. This brings the total to over 100 million.
