I recently came about an interesting news video from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster. The news clip was about Sony and its unfortunate data breach. What caught my attention initially though was the idea that various companies allow employees to log into Play Station online in order to compete against each other, chat and watch movies! This is such a common trend that as many as 77 million users have signed up for the service. Now that’s a fun and modern work day interaction technique. Here’s where it gets tricky… in order to use this service, people are very open to providing their names, passwords, birthdays, addresses and even credit card information on Sony servers. Day after day we all give a bit of our information away without wondering what the possible consequences may be. We expose ourselves to hackers on a daily basis, and unfortunately for Sony Play Station online users, they fell right into the trap. Hackers were able to get into the system and use the data that’s now easily accessible to them. This breach is being called the “largest theft of personal data on record.” What makes me more and more hesitant about revealing personal information is the fact that Sony now admits to having known about this breach yet hadn’t advised users until a week later. So as safe as we all may think we are, I would highly reconsider giving away such personal information, even if it is a so called “trusted” corporation such as Sony.
News link.. http://mediacenter.dw-world.de/english/video/#!/126215/Sony_admits_huge_data_breach