November, 2016
I was at a high falutin meeting a few weeks ago. The speaker was trying to sell the Cardiology department a “cloud based” addition to the electronic medical record that would help in one of their protocols. The patient data would be kept on an Amazon server.
Being the little shit that I am, I asked, “Is that the same server that shut down last week because of a DDoS ?” A DDoS is a hacker tool causing a denial of service by flooding the server with requests.
There was a pregnant pause and the speaker said, “No, these are special servers and they have never been hacked.”
I let my shitty mood ride that one and got to thinking, never? So I googled hacks of Amazon and yes Amazon has been hacked. I remembered seeing a Fox News article on the recent hack that I’d mentioned in the meeting and tried to find it. Wow, it was buried. It is still out there but not so easy to find.
Then I figured, Amazon is this huge enterprise balancing on one thing. Security of it’s internet services. Should that come into question their existence would be in dire straights.
Then I started looking at other hack stats.
Yahoo lost personal data on 500 million users, Linkedin lost 167 million passwords to hackers, Heartland lost 130 million credit and debit card numbers, and Dropbox lost 68 million user names and passwords. That’s not all, and just this year. Well in 2012 and 2014.
Then I got to thinking, why did it take 2-4 years to find these humongous hacks? Did the hackers sit on their pot of gold under the rainbow for all that time? Unlikely. Most likely, the enterprises that were hacked sat on the knowledge until they absolutely had to publicly announce their misfortune. Well, their customer’s misfortune. They didn’t want the knowledge to get out to potential customers. Oh, and it’s not just the customer’s data that is lost in these hacks. If the customer has information about, say a family member or friend, that data is lost too.
There ought to be truth in social media laws.
I hope they don’t hack YouTube, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t watch YouTube.
Your old grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.
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