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Personal Data For More Than 130,000 Sailors Hacked: U.S. Navy (reuters.com)
Hackers gained access to sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, for 134,386 current and former U.S. sailors, the U.S. Navy has said. According to Reuters: It said a laptop used by a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services employee working on a U.S. Navy contract was hacked. Hewlett Packard informed the Navy of the breach on Oct. 27 and the affected sailors will be notified in the coming weeks, the Navy said. "The Navy takes this incident extremely seriously - this is a matter of trust for our sailors," Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Admiral Robert Burke said in a statement.
Everything these days going wrong in information security is a 'hack'. Most likely this dude clicked on an advert on CNN and got some spyware installed.
It's not a 'hack' if it involves the user on a Windows machine installing something unsavory.
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I have confidence that I can keep MY computers secure from anything short of a dedicated state sponsored attack, but I am still vulnerable.
Anyone who I give my personal data to is a huge risk. Medical care. Employment. Shopping online. Almost any activity collects such data and these systems are compromised on a regular basis, sometimes with the disclosure of highly sensitive data.
Shit, I don't even trust my doctor's office to secure their infrastructure, but there's nothing you can do., because they will not give you medical care without entering your information into their computer systems.
Social Security Numbers need to be defanged. There is no reason they should be considered 'secret numbers' that can be used against a person. It should be totally safe to print your SSN on a t-shirt and wear it in public.
There is no excuse for it being 'dangerous' to reveal your SSN to others. It's not designed to be a 'protected' piece of information and when established, a Social Security Number was intended simply as an index.
Unfortunately, the credit industry seems to think they can use the posession of a person's SSN to extend credit to anybody who has access to it. Because of this, our SSNs have become weapons against us.
It would be easy for us all collectively to take that power of the SSN away from the credit industry. If 10% of all Americans agreed to disclose their SSNs publicly, it would make it impossible and impractical for the credit industry to use the revealing of a SSN to issue credit cards at cash registers in stores, which is, among other conveniences for them, what the 'secrecy of SSNs' is all about.
My dream is that someday enough of us will agree to publish our SSNs that it would become impractical for the credit industry to use it as a 'secret code.' The coolest way for this to happen would be for people to just start writing their SSN on a sign in front of their house, or on the mailbox or something of that nature.
Practically, though, the best way it could happen would be in an all-at-once event, so that the Credit Industry can't use SSNs tricking out as an attack vector on a few people at a time. But with a mix of some sort of 'big release' of SSNs and a trickling out, i.e. people not on the 'big release' revealing their SSNs on a place like their mailbox where it can't be verified en-masse, the use of SSNs as a 'secret number' for credit applications could be nullified.