During the course of the last months, we have seen frequent news of security breaches, with many websites falling victims of malicious attacks. While this by itself is not a news, the frequency and scale of this kind of attacks hardly passes without notice.
Sony’s example is probably the most visible example of this trend, as Kevin Mitnick points out.
I lost count of all the Sony attacks. CORRECTED: Sony Scoreboard: Hackers 12, Sony 0, Source: http://tinyurl.com/6dcugje
— Kevin Mitnick (@kevinmitnick) June 5, 2011 But they are not the only ones: the attacks on Citigroup and security company RSA are even more alarming. If even those companies that should be dealing with security issues every day are not impenetrable, chances are everyone’s data is at risk. Or, at least, that’s the message that most of the newspapers appear to be conveying.
While it’s easy to dismiss those people as fools, those facts should teach us something different: there is no such thing as a secure system.
I can’t tell how many times I registered on a website since I started surfing the Internet, and I bet it’s the same for you. We’ve been through countless registration forms, and we had to choose a username/password pair for each of them.