In response to this news article on BNN, Home Depot has publicly stated that hackers have successfully obtained around 53 million email addresses over a spam of a couple months.
This shocking news has caused panic and stress for the company and its customers, leaving law enforcement to launch an avid investigation, to prevent such events from occurring again.
I have followed such hacker groups fairly well over the past few years, and have made it clear in my mind that the internet is no safe place to store personal information, regardless of how “security safe” the websites or in this case emails pretend to be. Groups such as Anonymous and Chaos Computer Club have been hacking corporations, banks, websites and anything else that you could think of for many years now.
At this rate, I believe that these hacker groups will continue to hackinto almost anything they desire to, such as Home Depot’s internal hardwares. Although some may say that improvements in security and anti-virus systems are being made every day, it should also be recognized that groups like Anonymous will advance in their techniques as well.
So what is there to do? Are we hopeless in fighting against these groups?
Sources:
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/anonymous-hacked-bank-of-america
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club
http://www.bnn.ca/News/2014/11/7/Home-Depot-hacked-53-million-e-mail-addresses-stolen-.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)