For many of us, the abundance of personal information we put online combined with the popular model of sending a password reset e-mail has our online security resting unsteadily on the shoulders of one or two e-mail accounts. In Kim's case some of that information came from a blog, but it could just as easily have come from a MySpace page, a sibling's blog (speaking of their birthday, mom's name, etcetera) or from any number of places online.To someone that has been around information security for a while now, none of this is news. This is actually a little old-school footprint and crack. The problem is: in the old days, the hacker would have to go through great lengths to investigate their marks. As this article shows, those days are gone and now with a simple web search we can find out almost everything about a person. All of our digital shadows are getting longer and keeping track of every account we've signed up for is getting more and more difficult.
It's also critical to remember that once you put data online, it's almost impossible to delete it later. The more you blog about yourself, the more details you put in your social networking profiles, the more information about you is being archived, copied, backed up and analyzed almost immediately. Think first, post later.Great article and well worth the read.
I'll be posting more about the new risk model in the 2.0 world soon.
