Cyber Security & the Lack Thereof

by Clive Maxfield - Embedded, Aug. 19, 2015 – 

We are certainly living in interesting times. Over the years I've read a lot of science fiction stories that depicted various flavors of the future, many of which involved the concept of cyber security and nefarious strangers trying to access one's data.

Generally speaking, this sort of thing really didn't affect most of us until relatively recently in the scheme of things. How things have changed. Now it seems that we hear about data breaches on an almost daily basis, many of which can put their victims at risk of identity theft.

In 2013, for example, we discovered that hackers had managed to steal the credit and debit card information (including names, addresses, and phone numbers) associated with more than 70 million customers. My wife (Gina the Gorgeous) was hit by this one. She received a call from a company in North Carolina asking if we had really ordered a super-large screen TV on her credit card. Of course we hadn't. The main thing that had alerted them was the fact that the delivery address was to another state. Based on this, Gina ended up swapping out all of her credit and debit cards, which is a frustrating and time-consuming exercise.

Meanwhile, in 2014, I was informed that hackers had managed to access tens of millions of records from my health insurance company. I'm still waiting for the axe to fall from that one (we can only hope that I'm insured against axe-related incidents).

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