Just last week, Twitter became the latest casualty of poor Internet security when it fessed up to hackers having stolen account details for 250,000 of its users. As I’ve reported before, this type of activity seems set to rise, and you can be sure we will not be hearing of some of the more serious breaches.
We blogged last month about how Linkedin, eHarmony and Last.fm all failed their customers in the space of a week. We said at the time that this won’t be the last in a sorry list of customer security fails, and we didn’t have to wait long.
It seems the Iron Curtain may be re-emerging this week as Russian hackers first disclose 6.5m passwords from Linkedin, followed by 1.5m passwords from eHarmony, and then Last.fm with an undisclosed volume. Needless to say, there will be yet more sites added to this sorry list in the coming weeks.
Premium rate text messages are a useful and highly convenient way of using a mobile to charge for a service or product, or to make a donation to a worthy cause. You simply send a text message with a keyword and short code and quickly receive a text response. It is the text message you receive that triggers the premium rate charge rather than the message you send.
It seems unlikely to think that some of the more popular mobile apps would be taking personal and private data from your mobile and storing it on their own servers for whatever purpose they deem appropriate, but it appears that this is exactly what has been happening without either your permission or your knowledge.