Detta borde göra dig lite rädd:
“What we were able to do is alarming because we can now find vulnerabilities in people’s online presence very quickly,” Metropolitansky said. “For instance, if I can aggregate all the leaked credentials associated with you in one place, then I can see the passwords and usernames that you use over and over again.”
Of the 96,000 passwords contained in the dataset the students used, only 26,000 were unique.
“We also showed that a cyber criminal doesn’t have to have a specific victim in mind. They can now search for victims who meet a certain set of criteria,” Metropolitansky said.
For example, in less than 10 seconds she produced a dataset with more than 1,000 people who have high net worth, are married, have children, and also have a username or password on a cheating website. Another query pulled up a list of senior-level politicians, revealing the credit scores, phone numbers, and addresses of three U.S. senators, three U.S. representatives, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and a Cabinet member.
“Hopefully, this serves as a wake-up call that leaks are much more dangerous than we think they are,” Metropolitansky said. “We’re two college students. If someone really wanted to do some damage, I’m sure they could use these same techniques to do something horrible.”
Harvard: Imperiled information
Ett brutalt upvaknande om vilken data som flyter omkring därute. Ibland när man ser serier som NCIS, Criminal Minds, The Blacklist osv. så verkar historierna lite överdrivna. Jag tror att verklighet och fiktion ligger närmare än vi tror.
