Over on my library blog today, I link to an article in Wired, focused on internet security. It scared me no end–enough that I wanted to blog about it. Here’s the beginning of my post–click on over at the end to read the rest of it.
I just came across this absolutely frightening account on Wired of a man–a techie–who lost access to his email, his Amazon account, his Apple ID, the entire contents of his laptop and Apple devices–all due to some hackers who were bored. What scares me the most about this is that it happened to a guy who is “with it” when it comes to technology. He writes about it for Gizmodo, for crying out loud. I immediately started looking at my own security setup to see if the same thing could happen to me. It couldn’t–mine’s a bit different–but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that there’s another, easy way to get past the security I have set up.
When you get down to it, I’m tech-savvy, but not nearly as tech-savvy as some of the other people out there. Most of the time, I just take an approach of security in anonymity. There are billions of people out there–what are the odds that a hacker is going to take interest in me? I realize this is a really bad approach to take, but at the same time, there are so many ways for hackers to get access to my information, that it’s just easier for me not to worry about it.