As we have noted several times (see, for example, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), the hacking and theft of people’s vital information remains quite rampant around the globe, despite some technological advances.
To show how bad the situation is, consider this recent Russian example reported by Eric Auchaud for Reuters:
“Hundreds of millions of hacked user names and passwords for E-mail accounts and other Web sites are being traded in Russia’s criminal underworld, a security expert told Reuters. The discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included a majority of users of Mail.ru, Russia’s most popular E-mail service, and smaller fractions of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft E-mail users, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security. It is one of the biggest stashes of stolen credentials to be uncovered since cyber attacks hit major U.S. banks and retailers two years ago.”
“The latest discovery came after Hold Security researchers found a young Russian hacker bragging in an online forum that he had collected and was ready to give away a far larger number of stolen credentials that ended up totaling 1.17 billion records. After eliminating duplicates, Holden said, the cache contained nearly 57 million Mail.ru accounts — a big chunk of the 64 million monthly active E-mail users Mail.ru said it had at the end of last year. It also included tens of millions of credentials for the world’s three big E-mail providers, Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo, plus hundreds of thousands of accounts at German and Chinese E-mail providers.”
Click the image to access a video clip featuring Auchard.
A few, honest privacy experts have said for years that if you want to keep information confidential, you place it on a physical backup drive that you can detach from the Internet. Every known encryption and authentication technique can be broken. Most, including retina scanning, has been. “Internet security” is an oxymoron.