Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have all been hacked in the past month, according to a report.
This was the attention grabbing headline in the Telegraph in December 2013.
What it alluded to was that a lot of accounts were hacked as a result of passwords being stolen from members pc's that had been infected with "Pony" malware.
Pony malware infects end-users computers and then attempts to capture those users credentials.
The number of accounts breached was 2 million of which apparently 57% was facebook.
Trustwave, a company providing online security solutions said
“Although these accounts for online services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google, this is not the result of any weakness in those companies networks.”
Weak user passwords were deemed to be the culprit
A Facebook spokes person said " it appears that people’s computers may have been attacked by hackers using malware to scrape information directly from their web browsers."
The key word in there is "may"
More recently Ebay was hacked exposing the email, home addresses, passwords, phone numbers and birth dates of every eBay account holder
That equated to 145 million accounts worldwide
So bearing in mind the information the hackers already have on you, how hard would it be to join up the dots to access other online accounts you may have.
So let me guess.....
What do you have as the secret identity verification?
a) Place of birth
b) Mothers maiden name
c) Grandfathers first name
d) First school
e) First pet
d) Name of the road you first lived in
And in respect of the information gleaned from these hacks (these are just 2 out of many)
1. Have you recently amended your usernames and passwords?
2. Do you use the same tried and trusted password on all of your accounts?
Dominos Pizza Chain (France and Belgium only) in the last few days have publicly announced on Twitter that they have been hacked.
Information on 600,000 customer accounts was stolen.
A ransom of €30k was demanded by the hackers to prevent them releasing the stolen data onto the internet which they claim includes customers' full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, delivery instructions and even their favourite pizza toppings.
Pepperoni anyone?