Article by Byron Acohido
This article discusses the technique of phishing and its increase today compared to previous years. Acohido does a great job of presenting facts and explaining exactly what hackers are doing and why they are doing it.
He does not go into much detail on how hackers can get into your system but for this article it is best he doesn't. It's best he leaves out specific details because obviously he doesn't want to teach any new hackers tricks and because it would make this article dull and long.
Acohido uses Sophos as a source and quotes a Sophos researcher as well. However, although I know Sophos sells anti-virus products among other things, I do not believe the common reader would know this. I think he should have elaborated a bit on Sophos and what they sell, their purpose, etc.
I do like at the end the list Acohido provides of why hackers want your passwords and other bullet pointed facts. It is interesting to see this kind of print-type sidebar used in an online setting. I feel this aspect to the article makes it stronger because it pulls out some key facts for readers to focus on. Yet, I think that since this article is in the technology beat and is online, there could be more multimedia involved. In my opinion, a simple sidebar should not really be used in online media unless additional media resources are included.
Yet, I do feel as though I learned a lot from this article and my question about why should I care about cybercrooks was answered thoroughly.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-10-27-cybercrime-phishing-account-passwords_N.htm
That's all for now folks
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Overall, I agree with your critique of the article. Phishing is just ONE way in which we are harrassed. I wish the author had mentioned other activiteis like typo/cyber squatting and URL scamming, but it would probabaly take to much real estate on the website. He should consider making it a series. It's a shame that these things happen, because the penalty for the "safe" user is super encryption which makes you change passwords every 30 days with specific rules on number of Upper Case and lower case letters, symbols and numbers that must be in the password. This causes people to write them down on paper (more dangerous?) because they cannot remember 5 versions of NoVemBer#12$. :-) Good article, strong review
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment B. Shakey.
ReplyDeleteI defintiely agree with you that there are many issues involved in web scamming today. A series is actually a really great suggestion, especially for online media.
And I most certainly understand the hassle and pain of having to have so many passwords. I most definitely cannot keep all of mine straight and it's always some horrible mix of all the things you mentioned! I think we can all agree on the annoyance of that.
Ditto to all
ReplyDelete