Tag hacking attempts

Yes, another data breach, from another big company. In case you haven’t figured this out by now, your personal identity data is no longer safe online. Think that’s an overstatement?  Try this list on for size:

• Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield
• Target
• Niemann Marcus
• Michaels
• Dairy Queen
• UPS
• Home Depot
• Goodwill
• JP Morgan Chase
• Jimmy John’s
• KMart
• Staples
• Sony
• The list could go on and on

In case you’re wondering what that hacker is holding, it’s called a “floppy disk”, which were in use the last time data encryption laws were updated.

Image courtesy of chanpipat at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

All of these companies have suffered data breaches recently, in each case losing thousands, if not millions, of customer data sets to hackers. That data, depending on the case, could include your name, address, SSN, credit card number, birth date, telephone, email, and so on. With so many hacks occurring, odds are your information was included in one.

One of the most interesting things in the news about Anthem is that insurers aren’t required to encrypt consumers’ data under a 1990s federal law that remains the foundation for health care privacy in the Internet age.  This seems kind of strange at first, but consider that any law dated from the 1990s is as outdated as AOL dialup, and REALLY needs to be updated.

Regardless of who is at fault, Anthem is at least attempting to give aid to the 2,000,000+ Missourians affected (and those in other states as well), by providing 2 years of free credit monitoring and identity theft repair through AllClearID. To read more about the hack from Anthem, click here to visit AnthemFacts.com. I highly suggest you sign up!

One of the largest distributed brute force attacks on WordPress installations ever seen is currently going on, as reported by Mark Maunder of Wordfence Security on his blog. You can read the full post here. The attempts at hacking are running 30 times more frequently than average.

A brute force attack is when an attacker tries many times to guess your username password combination by repeatedly sending login attempts. A distributed brute force attack is when an attacker uses a large number of machines spread around the internet to do this in order to circumvent any blocking mechanisms you have in place.

If you have a WordPress-based site, I highly recommend that you pay close attention to it until these brute force attempts have waned.  If you suspect that you’ve been hacked, and need help recovering, you can always contact us here at Diamond Mind Web Design.