May 21, 2012
A lot of you might be changing your passwords tonight, especially if you are victims of another high-tech hacking.
Twenty-four million names of Zappos buyers, including their addresses, phone numbers, and some credit card information were compromised.
While there's nothing you can do to prevent this from happening, you can protect yourself.
Bill Dean, director of computer forensics at Sword & Shield, says big-company hackers are nothing new. In fact, most we never find out about at all.
"Somewhere along the line there's a flaw, there's a flaw in their infrastructure, a flaw in their security, not proper testing is being performed. But unfortunately these breaches are happening," said Dean.
He says Zappos did the right thing by telling their customers. But their information, including user name and password, is already in the hands of others.
So what do people need to do now?
"They need to immediately go to those sites and change those passwords," said Dean.
But not just on Zappos, but if you use the same user name or password on any other site, you need to change it.
Or else someone could break into your Facebook, Twitter, or worse, get into your money.
"For a small company, an attack like this can be detrimental. We've known companies that through financial attacks they've actually had to close their doors because all of their funds were drained from their accounts," said Dean.
So how do you protect yourself?
Dean says you need to change up your user names and passwords for different site. You should never make a financial transaction over a wireless internet connection, and don't let retailers save your credit card information.
"The more convenient something is, the opportunity is that it's going to be less secure," said Dean.
There are websites to help you come up with complicated passwords.
But make sure you store those somewhere only you can access.
Of course, he does not recommend writing those down because if you lose that, than someone can use an old-fashioned way to hack you online.
