Friday, January 19, 2007
It All Goes Via Internet
Wink: Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
We often worry about online security if we do banking, purchasing or pay bills via the internet. We look for companies that we know, secure sites with the lock snapped shut and what not. Still it hangs in our minds, is that information really encrypted as it passes from here to there.
Have you checked the news lately? A couple of major companies have revealed that hackers have managed to invade their systems and obtain critical customer information. Or in one case a removable backup hard drive has gone missing. Personal information including account numbers and sin numbers were included, for millions of customers. These were not online transactions, oh no these were credit card purchases directly at the cash registers in the stores.
This has happened before from time to time, but strangely enough as security methods get more sophisticated and supposedly more reliable, these direct attacks seem to be on the increase.
I have always had good feelings about online activities whether it be purchasing or banking, as far as the actual activity of doing it is concerned.
In the back of my mind I have always harboured the thought that the information I am supplying is going to someone's hard drive. I say someone because company or not, some individual has access to it. Some individual or individuals back up that information. How many individuals (besides the hackers) have knowledge of that personal information? Who knows?
What is even more alarming in these modern times, is the fact it doesn't matter if you have faith in online buying or not. Any time you use a credit card, or bank card of any kind, including a debit card, it goes via computer online.
Whether you swipe the card or hand it to the cashier and they do it, it all passes through hackerville. Fortunately it usually is a safe sercure trip - usually.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
We often worry about online security if we do banking, purchasing or pay bills via the internet. We look for companies that we know, secure sites with the lock snapped shut and what not. Still it hangs in our minds, is that information really encrypted as it passes from here to there.Have you checked the news lately? A couple of major companies have revealed that hackers have managed to invade their systems and obtain critical customer information. Or in one case a removable backup hard drive has gone missing. Personal information including account numbers and sin numbers were included, for millions of customers. These were not online transactions, oh no these were credit card purchases directly at the cash registers in the stores.
This has happened before from time to time, but strangely enough as security methods get more sophisticated and supposedly more reliable, these direct attacks seem to be on the increase.I have always had good feelings about online activities whether it be purchasing or banking, as far as the actual activity of doing it is concerned.
In the back of my mind I have always harboured the thought that the information I am supplying is going to someone's hard drive. I say someone because company or not, some individual has access to it. Some individual or individuals back up that information. How many individuals (besides the hackers) have knowledge of that personal information? Who knows?
What is even more alarming in these modern times, is the fact it doesn't matter if you have faith in online buying or not. Any time you use a credit card, or bank card of any kind, including a debit card, it goes via computer online.
Whether you swipe the card or hand it to the cashier and they do it, it all passes through hackerville. Fortunately it usually is a safe sercure trip - usually.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
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