LinkedIn just lost 6.5 million passwords in what was, reportedly, an easily carried out breach of their system. You'd think that big companies, or organizations could protect the information they hold - right?
Wrong.
Just add LinkedIn to the list of large scale breach's of companies or organizations from Visa to UMaine, that consumers would think they could rely on to protect them
That's why we always say when you're talking about databases it's not a matter of whether there will be a breach, but when and how bad it will be.
From the Virginia Prescription monitoring program hackers who held 8 million patient records and 35 million prescriptions hostage for $10 million dollars;
to the University of Maine system breach of social security numbers and credit card information of students and employees described as a “tragedy of errors” by the University of Maine System’s information technology chief;
to the big credit cards - MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover, who recently acknowledged breach of consumer information;
this latest report just reinforces why we work to create privacy protections for new media and technology driven privacy threats. I will be spending some of my summer exploring things we can do here in Maine to ensure that we continue to control data about our movements, our personal messages, our medical data, and more.
Things are changing fast out there. so stay tuned!
