PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Data Security

And then after all of that, the Russian/Chinese/East European/whatever other mob hackers break into Sony, Target, Home Depot, Anthem Health and steal all your personal info anyway.

I have no idea how it will look but I think at some point there will have to be big changes as to how the internet works.

A lot of these problems are simply laziness on the part of all of us including the largest corporations in the world. It's not practical for a private company to require CIA level computer security access just to have you sit at your desk and do your job. But, right now it seems like all it takes is an insider like what apparently happened with Sony and all hell breaks loose. That happened with one of the big banks years ago (Citi maybe?), that was an insider too.

It appears like the banks themselves are ok now but non financial corporations? Who knows. It seems like they think it's cheaper to eat the bad publicity rather than spend whatever's necessary to upgrade their security to the level of the banks. Apparently both Sony and Anthem kept a huge legacy database still attached to their online network when that wasn't necessary so millions of old customer and employee records they haven't used in years got hacked too. It's obvious with some of these companies, nobody is taking this seriously, they're not paying attention, they're underpaid or whatever so nobody cares. They need to take the literal meaning of the word "foolproof" as in most of our employees are fools/idiots/morons and design systems accordingly. I'm sure that's very expensive.

I work at a CPA firm and we have an offsite IT company. We've talked to them a lot about spam emails and there's only so much anybody can do. Even after the filtering I get literally 15-20 to ONE spam vs real emails. Some of the spams use real client names, the IRS, other firms, my name, my friends name, my dogs name and they all have very legitimate looking attachments supposedly from UPS, Amazon, the IRS, banks, whomever. These are all entities we do deal with so I have to look at this stuff (not open attachments) before deciding to delete it. The first 15 minutes of my day is spent culling out the real emails and nuking the rest. If it's after a weekend or days off it's more like a half hour or more. It's unbelievable and it's getting worse. I think part of our problem is we have our own URL so that's what's being attacked by the spammers. We've talked about simply using gmail or another big commercial ISP and let them filter this crap but then we just look the same as a kid in her bedroom as far as email addresses are concerned.

Bob