The article describes the emergence of a new group of hackers who may seek to make public, a la Wikileaks style, private emails of private citizens. Concerning is the possibility that unlike Wikileaks, information in the emails will not be redacted and the publication of the private information would be indiscriminate - in other words there’s no noble purpose behind it. The article focuses on corporate emails, but what about personal emails - that could be equally be at risk of being hacked.
So then the question for all of us is - how much personal information are you comfortable sharing in an email? Will you write less for fear that someone might “hack” into your email accounts and publish the information?
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2011/03/do-wikleaks-imitators-put-your-e-mail-at-risk.html
Excerpts from the article:
Stealing someone’s e-mail and publishing it online, regardless of the impact on innocent bystanders, is hardly new. It happened when a criminal stole Sarah Palin’s e-mails during the last presidential campaign, and it’s happened to plenty of so-called “white hat” security researchers in the past. The Anonymous incident is different, however, because the group made it so easy for others to search the e-mails for embarrassing details.
“It’s the sophistication with which they put it out there that’s different,” Poulsen said. “That was clearly WikiLeaks-inspired.”
Gregg Housh calls himself an Internet activist who has been associated with Anonymous in the past. He describes himself as an avid observer of Anonymous, and he has at times served as the group’s public face. He said Anonymous had no concerns about such collateral damage when it published the data, and probably won’t think much about that going forward.
…
Internet users have always been told that anything they write in an e-mail could end up in court, or in front of a boss’s prying eyes. Now more than ever, that warning should be heeded: Don’t type anything on a keyboard that you wouldn’t want the entire world to see. Even if you feel like your company’s servers could never be hacked, can you trust every company you ever e-mail?
And here’s another piece of advice from Poulsen.
