Sony PlayStation Network User Information Hacked
Sony Corp. on Tuesday admitted that hackers have obtained personal data and possibly credit card information of tens of millions of people who have registered for PlayStation Network, the company’s online game and movie service, as well as its Qriocity digital music service.
PlayStation is a fun game, data breach is not.
As of March 31st, the Sony PlayStation Network has about 77 million accounts. These accounts link users to the network to obtain downloads and access online movies through services like Netflix. While Sony states that not all of the 77 million accounts are active accounts and some individuals have multiple accounts, they are not denying that a breach of information occurred.
The company spokesman, Patrick Seybold, admitted that the hackers not only gained such information as names, addresses, phone numbers, user names, birth dates, email addresses and passwords of registrants; but they are unsure if credit card information was compromised as well. Update: Sony recently announced that an additional 25 million records were breached.
“While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility,” Seybold wrote. ”If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.”
iPhone and Droid Want to Be Your Big Brother
Remember the iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad with Apple shattering Big Brother? How times have changed! Now they are Big Brother.
According to recent Wall Street Journal findings, Apple Inc.’s iPhones and Google Inc.’s Android smartphones regularly transmit your locations back to Apple and Google, respectively. This new information only intensifies the privacy concerns that many people already have regarding smartphones. Essentially, they know where you are anytime your phone is on, and can sell that to advertisers in your area (or will be selling it soon enough).
The actual answer here is for the public to put enough pressure on Apple and Google that they stop the practice of tracking our location-based data and no longer collect, store or transmit it in any way without our consent.
You may ask, “don’t all cell phone carriers know where you are due to cell tower usage?” Yes, but Google and Apple are not cell phone carriers, they are software and hardware designers and should have no real reason (other than information control) to be tracking your every move without your knowledge. Google and Apple are not AT&T or Verizon, therefore they should not be recording, synching and transmitting your location like it appears they are.
Are You Begging to Get Fired?
We’ve all done it before – left the table to get a coffee refill or go to the bathroom and left our laptop, iPad, smartphone or purse sitting on the table. We justify it by telling ourselves that we are in a friendly place and will only be gone a second. Our tendency is to blame technology for information theft, but the heart of the problem is almost always a human error, like leaving our devices unattended. Realizing that carelessness is the source of most laptop theft makes it a fairly easy problem to solve.
My office is directly above a Starbucks, so I spend way too much time there. And EVERY time I’m there, I watch someone head off to the restroom (see video) or refill their coffee and leave their laptop, iPad, iPhone, briefcase, purse, client files and just about everything else lying around on their table like a self-service gadget buffet for criminals and opportunists alike.
I trust deeply in the honesty and integrity of the people I know well, but if you are trusting your Starbucks crowd with this amazingly valuable data, you are going to get a steaming hot lap full of trouble. Data thieves target places like this because it is an upscale, trusting clientele. Just ask Ben Bernake, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose wife got taken at a Starbucks.
Comprehensive Opt Out List for Marketing Databases
Major data breaches like the recent Epsilon Breach occur frequently, even if you don’t hear about all of them. With all the publicity surrounding this particular breach, people have been asking how to remove themselves from some of those marketing lists that are frequently compromised.
Opting our of marketing databases is one way to lower your risk of becoming a data breach victim.
So, how do I get out of marketing data bases?
Most databases allow you to opt out of having them share and sell your information, you just need to find out how. Many sites make it tricky to get this done, but most sites that are selling or harvesting your information allow you to do so one way or another.
The Privacy Rights Clearing House lists 135 marketing data brokers who are selling your private information, and tells you whether or not they have opt-out policies. If they do, you have to go to the brokers’ websites and suppress your name yourself. Most of the sites have hard-to-find opt out pages, but you can generally track them down by visiting the Privacy Policy which frequently appears as a link in small print at the bottom of the home page.
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The Smartphone Survival Guide: 10 Critical Tips in 10 Minutes
Smartphones are the next wave of data hijacking. Let this Survival Guide help you defend yourself before it’s too late.
Smartphones are quickly becoming the fashionable (and simplest) way for thieves to steal private data. Case in point: Google was recently forced to remove 21 popular Android apps from its official application website, Android Market, because the applications were built to look like useful software but acted like electronic wiretaps. At first glance, apps like Chess appear to be legitimate, but when installed, turn into a data-hijacking machine that siphons private information back to the developer.
The Smartphone Survival Guide gives you extensive background knowledge on many of the safety and privacy issues that plague Smartphones, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phone. Mobile computing is an indispensable tool in the modern world of constant connectivity, but you must protect these powerful tools. Mobile access to the web is here to stay, but we must learn to harness and control it. So whether you are reading this to help protect your own personal Smartphone, or valuable corporate assets, the Smartphone Survival Guide will start you in the right direction.
5 Steps to Avoid Facebook Destruction in Business
How should my business balance the risks of social media with the rewards of this increasingly dominant and highly profitable marketing medium? That’s the very insightful question that a CEO asked me during a presentation I gave on information leadership for a Vistage CEO conference.
Think of your move into social media (Facebook/Fan/Business Pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) like you would approach the task of helping your fifteen-year-old daughter prepare to drive on her own. You love her more than anything on earth and would do anything for her (just like you will go to great lengths grow your business), but that doesn’t mean you just hand her the keys. Trying to forbid or ignore the movement into social marketing is like telling your teen that they can’t get their license. It isn’t going to happen, so you might consider putting down the denial and controlling those pieces of change that are within your power. The task is to maximize the positives of her newly bestowed freedom while minimizing any negatives; the same is true in social media.
Here’s a simple plan to follow that will help keep you safe and productive:
Stock Plummets as Epsilon Breach Rears Ugly Head
When will corporations learn? I received 6 data breach emails yesterday because of the Epsilon’s lack of security.
Have you been inundated with more spam and phishing emails recently? If so, it may be due to one of the largest email and data breaches in Internet history. Epsilon is one of the world’s largest providers of marketing-email services and they handle more than 40 billion emails annually and more than 2,200 global brands.
Epsilon issued the following statement: “On March 30th, an incident was detected where a subset of Epsilon clients’ customer data were exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon’s email system. The information that was obtained was limited to email addresses and/or customer names only.”
The following companies have already sent out warnings (like those below) to their companies: Best Buy, Capital One, JPMorgan, Citibank, Kroger, Barclays Bank of Delware, Visa, American Express, US Bank, TiVo Inc. and Walgreen Co, Robert Half, Kraft, Home Shopping Network, QFC, Marriott Rewards, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, Ameriprise Financial, LL Bean Visa Card, Brookstone, Dillons, the College Board, McKinsey & Company, New York & Company, Disney Vacations, Staples, TIAA-CREF, Verizon, Borders, Smith Brands, Abe Books, Lacoste.
Sileo In the Media
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