Putting personal information online is seldom a good idea. As the world becomes more and more connected, there are a growing number of hacking methods that should grab Internet users’ attention.
People who have Twitter or Facebook accounts and blogs tend to share their personal information with the world, rarely thinking about whether strangers who read their work could use it against them.
But it’s something everyone needs to carefully consider.
Francois Cousteix, an unemployed French hacker who lives with his parents and doesn’t have a college degree, managed to hack into Twitter’s administrative accounts. Through these accounts, Cousteix was able to view vital Twitter statistics and log into the accounts of celebrities such as Britney Spears and President Barack Obama.
According to the Associated Press, Cousteix didn’t do so by using randomly generated strings of numbers and symbols to crack their passwords. Instead, he merely performed some simple research.
Cousteix used information from Twitter administrators’ blogs, as well as other data he managed to find online, to guess their security questions and reset their passwords. Once he hacked into those accounts, he had access to every account on the Twitter network.
A few people’s carelessness is all it took for Cousteix to essentially take control of Twitter. This situation highlights a disturbing reality about the Internet — it isn’t nearly as safe as people think.
The security questions people use in the event that they need to reset a password are often less than completely secure. Security questions such as “Where were you born?” and “What is your mother’s maiden name?” fall into four categories.
The first contains questions that only the person who made the account could know the answers to. The second is filled with queries where individuals’ close friends and family members also know the answers. The third includes queries that can be easily figured out by anyone who knows the person, and the final group comprises questions with answers that can be looked up online in two seconds.
Obviously, everyone should use questions from the first category when attempting to create a secure password. Considering Cousteix’s success (as well as the nature of the pre-selected questions themselves), however, many people clearly choose questions from the last two groups.
Social media networks lull their users into a false sense of security. After all, the Internet is a warm, welcoming and friendly place, right? No one could possibly want to harm anybody else, so it must be OK to give the entire world access to your personal information.
But that’s where people are wrong. Your private information is yours alone; no one should have access to it other than you and people you actually know.
Twitter’s administrators whose accounts were broken into are perfect examples of people who let too much of their private information be known to the world.
And if people as tech-savvy as them could fall prey to that sort of mistake, who knows how many others are doing the same on a daily basis.
Casey Goodwin is an engineering freshman and may be reached at [email protected]
