I read with interest on the post titled 'JohnCow.com was hacked! and Unhacked!' which touches on issues of the security that we have on the internet. Therefore, I would like to do a review on this post to tell you more about how drastic is the consequence you have to bear should your account be hacked and also to give you a better understanding of how to prevent your accounts on internet from being intruded illegally by the hackers.
On securityfocus.com, it was reported that a 20 year old hacker hacked into the famous search engine on the internet, called http://www.yahoo.com/ and could change and alter the contents of a news on Yahoo! News. Now imagine what if a hacker hacked into Yahoo on September 11, 2000 and changes lists of people who were on the planes, or reported missing, or all kinds of things that could cause a lot of grief and anxiety to the family or next of kins.
On blogwired.com, it was reported that the then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and had some of its confidential mails being made public. Now this is a serious situation, imagine if a top ranked government officer or even the president's email account being hacked, then the top secret missions or policies would have been known to public and this could endanger the country or even the lives of the officials that are involved in the top secret missions.
On itsecurity.com, it was reported that a hacker by the name of Jonathan James cracked into NASA computers and stole softwares worth about $1.7million. Now, this is alot of money, what if Jonathan was not caught, then they would have lost the amount of money because of the vulnerability of the internet security. Another question is, if a software developed by a software programmer which he has not gained a copywright rights to it being hacked and retrieved illegally by the hacker, then he would have lost the piece of work he had been working hard on and could not cash in on the programme even if it is widely used in the world.
On a chinese entertainment tabloid, it was reported that illicit and compromising photos of a popular taiwanese celebrity was exposed. According to the story, she had stored her photos on a online in a private album and had it password protected. A hacker somehow managed to obtain her password and hacked in and shared the photos to the world. Now this raises a concern and everyone should be careful with passwords as this episode could spell an end to her career in the entertainment industry and this has certainly ruined her image and reputation in the public.
On the prevention side, according to dailyautocad.com, we could use a special add-ons on our mozilla firefox or internet explorer to protect ourselves from hackers. It is called the McAfee's site advisor. It establishes the fake sites that could be trying to steal our passwords and prevent them from doing it.
Other than that, If you are afraid of losing all your messenger contacts should your account be hacked, try to back-up your messenger contact list. You can export instant message contact list to a file and also copy your registration information that you have edit before to a word file and burn both of them into a disc.
You should also keep your passwords private and not to share among your friends, even to your closest friends as they could just blurt out your passwords to other people.
Another way is to make sure that you use 'alpha-numeric' password because a combination of both makes it very hard for hackers to hack into the account. For example , avoid using the password related to your name like Marrylim. Instead, try to combine with some numbers that are not related to your birthdates. For example, try using numbers that are only known to you like your exam IDs or your handphone serial number's last 4 digits. So you could use Marlim0042. This really makes it very hard for the hackers.
Lastly, try to use anti viruses such as McAfee or even Avg because at least they can provide some form of protection to you. They could filter off the threats that have already been identified in their databases and will already have solutions to overcome them.
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