Monday, August 11, 2014

INTERNET - Criminals Steal 1.2 Billion Web Credentials

"After criminals steal 1.2 billion web credentials, how to protect personal info from data breaches" PBS NewsHour 8/6/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Computer hacking and the breaches of privacy that come with them are becoming a regular and unwelcome feature of our wired world.

Now The New York Times and a security firm based in the Midwest are reporting a massive one that includes the collection of more than a billion username and password combinations and more than 500 million e-mail addresses.  What’s more, the perpetrators appear to be a shadowy Russian crime ring.

Details, including the names of the victims, are hard to come by.  But the news has raised eyebrows around the world.  So, how serious is it?

For that, we turn to Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, a Web security firm.

Mr. Alperovitch, tell us just in context of all these other breaches we have had in the past year, say, how — relative to those, how big is this?

DMITRI ALPEROVITCH, CrowdStrike:  Well, the number is certainly striking; 1.2 billion credentials is a lot.  In the past, we have seen some big breaches that numbered in the hundreds of millions.

But this is certainly the biggest one that I — that I can remember.

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