Half of American Adults Hacked This Year

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Half of adult Americans? Doesn't that number seem pretty damn high to you?

Hackers have exposed the personal information of 110 million Americans -- roughly half of the nation's adults -- in the last 12 months alone. That massive number, tallied for CNNMoney by Ponemon Institute researchers, is made even more mind-boggling by the amount of hacked accounts: up to 432 million.
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I was thinking, "Heh, not me. Wait a minute."

Yeah, my steam account got hacked. But I figured it out immediately, canceled the card that was attached to the account. In less than a week, got the account back.
 
Possible. Depends on the meaning of "hacked"

How many people where potentially hit by the Target breach?
That's the only one that could have hit me, but since I only use my Target card, it didn't really matter.
 
Probably there are overlap in many cases, so some people are counted twice (or more). Also just because you are "exposed" doesn't nessasarly mean you will be exploited.
 
They've been playing Watch Dogs while wearing Google Glass and think its real lol.
 
curious how they came to getting that actual number. think oif how many people were hacked and didnt even know it
 
I wouldn't doubt it if some of these companies like Microsoft leave open a few of these holes, err. I mean backdoors for the NSA to use.
 
I do IT support. Based on the apparent IQ level of most of my customer base, these numbers don't surprise me. I'll be honest, half of the people I deal with click on just about every link they get in an e-mail, open just about any attachment, and then go searching the internet for music and tv shows -- and when anything pops up saying they need to install something to view something, they apparently click yes. A lot of these same people insist on using passwords that are 6-8 characters long and are either their pets names or some other common word. I really don't understand it, but for some reason, otherwise intelligent people (doctors, lawyers, professors, etc) seem to become gullible 5 year olds when they go online. When it comes the internet, most people are morons.
 
I had my newegg account and best buy account hacked right before Christmas. Was my own dumb fault for using the same PW on both, but the BB one got hacked first 5 minutes after I ordered something. Either they got it through heartbleed or BB had an inside breach.
 
mdburkey said:
I do IT support. Based on the apparent IQ level of most of my customer base, these numbers don't surprise me. I'll be honest, half of the people I deal with click on just about every link they get in an e-mail, open just about any attachment, and then go searching the internet for music and tv shows -- and when anything pops up saying they need to install something to view something, they apparently click yes. A lot of these same people insist on using passwords that are 6-8 characters long and are either their pets names or some other common word. I really don't understand it, but for some reason, otherwise intelligent people (doctors, lawyers, professors, etc) seem to become gullible 5 year olds when they go online. When it comes the internet, most people are morons.
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You didn't even read the article, genius.
 
Aluisious said:
You didn't even read the article, genius.
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Yes, I did read the article -- which is why I said what I said.

Most people are morons when it comes to computer security -- including the ones at the companies being hacked. Basically, they use simple, stupid passwords on secure systems. If they are forced to use complex password, they write them down. If they receive e-mail messages with links in them, they click on the blindly. They surf for videos and music over lunch at their "supposedly" secure workstation and install whatever they are prompted to access said files.

In essence, most people are morons when it comes to computer security -- which is why the figures don't surprise me. Basically, the behaviors of the idiots using the computers AT THE COMPANIES who are leaking data like sieves are responsible for the data hacks -- they basically are engaging in risky/stupid behavior on machines that either contain or are on the same networks as computers than contain critical user data. The end result -- the current debacle we have now.

True security holes like Heartbleed are MINOR in comparison to the data breaches caused/allowed by stupid users. Why try grabbing 64K chunks of random user data from an SSL server that is hard to identify and back trace, when you can instead using common phishing and/or malware type techniques to get access to the entire data file???
Or when you have systems running on old servers that have been patched in several years and have plenty of well known 0day vulnerabilities exposed to the world?

Half the businesses I know have their own internal PC's on the same network as their guest WiFi. Lots of them leave UPNP enabled -- which opens up a huge can of worms because almost any program that can be snuck in house can open up a set of ports to allow someone in.

So...am I surprised by the quoted half of adults figure? No.

Frankly, I suspect the REAL number is probably far higher than that -- we just don't know about it (yet).
 
mdburkey said:
I do IT support. Based on the apparent IQ level of most of my customer base, these numbers don't surprise me. I'll be honest, half of the people I deal with click on just about every link they get in an e-mail, open just about any attachment, and then go searching the internet for music and tv shows -- and when anything pops up saying they need to install something to view something, they apparently click yes.
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Oh come on, you know downloading and running a file called videoplayer.exe is a smart choice. ;)
 
I got hacked out of the AnnualCreditReport.com Website. Fortunately someone misused the information and used a bad address and I was alerted to an ID theft attempt. So when I was trying to sort out what happened, I tried to access the acr website, it said I used my free report already, which was not true. Their attitude about it was "go blow" and send an e-mail to our auto-delete box.

So basically, I would suggest using that site every year just to block someone using it for you.
 
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