Nexus
Site Support
Administrator
Moderator
Professional
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Wiki Moderator
UNLEASHED
There have been some rumors floating around about UO accounts hacked, and at least one person recently has suggested his Stratics Account was taken over by someone else. While there is no evidence that anything malicious has happened to Stratics Server, it seems like common sense to make this post.
As many of you may know it came out last month that 3 Billion (yes BILLION) Yahoo! email addresses and passwords were obtained when Yahoo!'s servers were breached in 2013. While I doubt the people who preformed this nefarious deed were looking to gain access to your Stratics account, as time goes on this data will propagate across the shadier corners of the internet and become easier to obtain by individuals who may desire to exploit or take advantage or the information. This may have been one of the most memorable and serious breaches of personal data, it however is not an isolated occurrence, Google, Microsoft, Mail.ru, and other email providers have all faced hackings in which smaller quantities of data were taken in the past, and new data breaches are occurring all the time.
Malware, and virus' are also a major concern. These if so designed may act as keystroke loggers and transmit your data to hackers, there is no excuse in this day for not having decent anti-virus/malware scans occurring on your hardware regularly. Quality free solutions are available for use, and while they may not offer real time protection as most paid versions do, preforming/having daily or weekly scans scheduled for while you are sleeping at least gives you more protection than nothing. Most importantly convince yourself that, "No Operating System is Safe", this includes products from Apple (ask Charlie Miller). various Linux distributions, Android, and other desktop and mobile OS'. Any computer system, regardless of the operating system is only as safe as the person using it.
So what can you do?
As many of you may know it came out last month that 3 Billion (yes BILLION) Yahoo! email addresses and passwords were obtained when Yahoo!'s servers were breached in 2013. While I doubt the people who preformed this nefarious deed were looking to gain access to your Stratics account, as time goes on this data will propagate across the shadier corners of the internet and become easier to obtain by individuals who may desire to exploit or take advantage or the information. This may have been one of the most memorable and serious breaches of personal data, it however is not an isolated occurrence, Google, Microsoft, Mail.ru, and other email providers have all faced hackings in which smaller quantities of data were taken in the past, and new data breaches are occurring all the time.
Malware, and virus' are also a major concern. These if so designed may act as keystroke loggers and transmit your data to hackers, there is no excuse in this day for not having decent anti-virus/malware scans occurring on your hardware regularly. Quality free solutions are available for use, and while they may not offer real time protection as most paid versions do, preforming/having daily or weekly scans scheduled for while you are sleeping at least gives you more protection than nothing. Most importantly convince yourself that, "No Operating System is Safe", this includes products from Apple (ask Charlie Miller). various Linux distributions, Android, and other desktop and mobile OS'. Any computer system, regardless of the operating system is only as safe as the person using it.
So what can you do?
- Stay aware, news of data breaches such as this always covered by the media.
- Regularly change your passwords
- Don't use common passwords.
- Create Unique Passwords (don't share between accounts/sites)
- User separate Emails for different accounts
- Regularly scan your PC for virus' and malware.
- If at all possible avoid public Wi-Fi
- Be extremely wary of unsolicited emails
- Be cautions about links in emails
- Use anti-virus AND anti-malware tools to check your equipment