A Monster bug

It seems that one thing that the future holds for the internet for certain, alongside the rising bandwidth consumption by the average household and a heightened demand for interactivity, is that there are going to be more and more criminals trying to hack sites and steal sensitive (i.e. valuable) information. Worse yet, the innovations of legitimate programmers will only be equaled to that of unethical ones.

Case in point- Monster.com just got hacked hard, and the resumes of millions of users world-wide have fallen into the hands of thieves. The reality of internet security is that there is no infallible encryption. The only way to hide info is to keep it completely inaccessible from the web- then thieves can only get it the old fashioned way! But as our lives are increasingly tied into the web, the ability to keep all of your private information in the hands of the organizations you entrust it becomes harder and harder to keep track of.

I conduct a lot of business on the web- I do my banking on the web, I am an eBay regular, I use a wide array of online services from logmein.com to Facebook. If a dedicated hacker wanted to steal my identity, I have left the trail of breadcrumbs on the web to do it. It seems kind of grim, doesn't it? Ever blog about your hometown? A hacker might save that info to hack your "forget password" question. Not only that, but your potential perpetrator could be anywhere on Earth with a telephone line. Right now there could be a gang of Lithuanian thugs with incredible math skills hacking your PayPal account! Good God, maybe its time to burn all of the hard-drives!

Now that's a bit much, isn't it? And anyway, at this point there are probably too many hard-drives in the world that have too much info about you anyway, swirling in an ocean of binary code that is the rest of our digitized personal information. Nope, it is time to suck it up and play smart. It won't save your Monster account, but nobody said this world wasn't going to be without any risk.

So what's a person to do? First, if you are a business owner, be smart. Don't go for the cheapest web developer when you are building a site. Shop around and remember that a reputable, well-established company is probably hip to the most recent security needs on the web. Online forms are often the way most criminals will hack into your databases. This can be avoided if the forms are built up to modern standards. And by "modern," I mean the past 6 months (or maybe days... hours?). There are always good, inexpensive freelancers available, too. Just check their references and make sure you are going with someone you can trust.

Second, don't get lazy with usernames or passwords.

Third, any email that may be spam should be considered spam. Any offer via email that seems too good to be true is spam. Third, if an email received from a friend or family's email account doesn't seem to "sound" like them, it is spam.

Fourth, if you don't know what spam is, stop using email, have a tech savvy friend remove and destroy your hard-drive. Then sell your computer. Use the proceeds to buy yourself some stamps.

Remember that you are never perfectly safe, with or without the internet. Don't react like the sky is falling because sites like Monster get hacked. There isn't much you can do other than to check your credit status every now and again to make sure someone isn't robbing you blind. And remember, a little caution can prevent you from making some big mistakes.