Unit 441 Information Security Article Evaluation

Information Security Article Evaluation
University Of Phoenix
CMGT
441
December 11, 2013

DISCOVERY OF TWO MILLION HACKED CREDENTIALS. ‘123456’ IS AGAIN THE COMMON PASSWORD.
Consider the various amounts of social media sites and email accounts, along with the millions of passwords that are used to access these sites. Society continues to crave more social media interactions and email accounts but yet there is not a cohesive effort to secure the passwords that are used for these sites. In a recent article by SC Magazine, it reported the compromise of over two million accounts. The goal of this evaluation will be to reference numerous aspects of this security article, describe each aspect, with comments on its usefulness
and validity. Each selected portion of the article will be followed by details and reasons behind the selected viewpoints.
Having spent half of my life in the Navy IT Security field, I found this recent article to be absolutely credible with all of the information that it entails.
According to SC Magazine “Researchers with SpiderLabs, the advanced security team with information security company Trustwave, discovered a treasure trove of nearly two million pilfered credentials from a variety of companies, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn and payroll service provider ADP.” I was able to verify this portion of the article when the information was provided from a known credible news source (CNN). The security breach made national news and was also provided on our local News4 as well.
The article also identified the threat as a Pony Botnet Controller that captured and compromised over two million accounts. The possibilities of these types of threats are very real as experienced by many websites during this incident. One of the best ways to try and combat these type threats is to keep your patches and antivirus up to date, which was also mentioned in this article. According to a CNN Money article on this incident, the below website accounts were compromised during this event (Pagliery J, 2013).
318,000 Facebook
accounts
70,000 Gmail, Google+ and YouTube accounts
60,000 Yahoo accounts
22,000 Twitter accounts
9,000 Odnoklassniki accounts (a Russian social network)
8,000 ADP accounts (ADP says it counted 2,400)
8,000 LinkedIn accounts
Also discovered during this incident was the well-known security issue with users adopting weak passwords. The SC Magazine article states that “Of the two million compromised accounts, more than 25,000 of them used ‘123456’ as a password. This is an ongoing issue in IT, and those who use different characters and numbers are safer from incidents of this type. As an IT professional, I am constantly reminding my employees and coworkers of the importance of having different passwords for different logins. Using passwords such as ‘123456’, is an open door to your personal information.
The evaluation of this article revealed a few key things that users can do to add additional protection to their personal accounts.
The article was considerably valid as was demonstrated by credible news programs and other articles. The importance of keeping patches and antivirus signatures up to date, to help prevent these types of attacks was discussed in detail. Users selecting strong passwords was also discussed, and revealed as a key component in the ability to compromise these accounts. This article was valuable and affected a lot of people. It is clear that there are prevention methods that can be used, to secure your
accounts.
References
Greenberg A. Discovery of two million hacked credentials, '123456 ' is again the common
Password. Rretrieved December 9, 2013 from http://www.scmagazine.com//discovery-of-two-million-hacked-credentials-123456-is-again-the-common-password/article/324201/
Pagliery J. 2 million Facebook, Gmail and Twitter passwords stolen in massive hack. Retrieved
December 10, 2013 from http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/04/technology/security/passwords-stolen/