Now it is time for me to talk briefly about an eyeopening event that occurred quite a bit ago on a major corporation. The event that occurred were the "Playstation Network (PSN) hacks". If any of my readers happens to have a PS3 then they might have noticed that the PSN was down for the better half of a month a while back. What happened though? What did the hackers take? Why the hell are you telling me this? All of these are good questions, which I will do my best to answer.
What happened is that the PSN was attacked and brought down by a group of internet hackers who followed in the wake of the group Anonymous. Anonymous is an internet based group of people who try and fight the "oppressive corporations" and "evils of societies" in today's world. In reality, they usually DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) businesses and government websites they deem worthy of at the time. There are legitimate hackers among the group, so they should never be taken lightly. Anyway, I digress, When Anonymous DDOSed and brought down the PSN, the rogue group of hackers found their way into the PSN's internal network and started to mess around. They did this by tricking the system into thinking they were Playstation developers with a couple cracked CD's.
The hackers took any sort of personal information they could get their hands on, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and yes, it is possible they even took credit cards. Sound bad? Well it is. I HIGHLY doubt you would run up to some random person on the street and start blurting out all of your identifying information.
I'm telling you all this to hopefully get in your head that NOBODY IS 100% SAFE ON THE INTERNET. If a good enough hacker (like those hired by foreign governments, yes, those types of hackers do exist) wants into your system, they will get in if it's connected to the internet. The millions of people who trusted Sony Entertainment with their valuable credit card/personal information were let down. This breach in security has cost Sony hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit protection services, hiring better coders to try and ensure something like this doesn't happen again, and potential client loss (myself included).
So please, be safe, be educated, and (try to) be secured!
The following imagine is the "Operation" mission statement that the group Anonymous had for the Sony attack.
