You thought the exposure of adulterous website Ashley Madison was over? There’s a new revelation out. Apparently, most Ashley Madison customers had one thing in common.
Most Ashley Madison accounts were owned by men. Of the 36+ million users, 31 million were men and only 5.5 million were women. This would make competition so unbalanced that to normal human beings, it wouldn’t even be worth joining. But wait…there’s more! It turns out many of the profiles were fake. One former Ashley Madison employee claims she was told to make over 1,000 fake profiles. She worked so hard to make so many fake profiles she eventually sued her employer for physical and mental stress. Her case was settled out of court. Researchers study IP addresses. An IP address of 127.0.0.1 is known as a loopback or ‘home’ IP address. So accounts that have the 127.0.0.1 are likely to have the ‘home’ Ashley Madison address, or were made at their headquarters. Up to 82% of women accounts were traced to the ‘home’ IP address. There were other discrepancies. Of the people checking Ashley Madison updates, over 20,200,000 were men and only 1,492 were women. Of people who even using the chat system, over 11,000,000 were men and only 2,409 were women. If fact, it’s believed that of the 5.5 million female Ashley Madison accounts, only 12,000 were real!
If these statistics are right, then not only is competition extremely intense to get married women, it’s pretty much nonexistent. They’re selling a fantasy that most men will never have through their website, and the site makers know it! They’re even exploiting their own workers to make sure of it. When I first read hacking group Impact Team’s side of the story, I thought they were crusading against the moral acts of adultery and the family and social ramifications of it. But now it’s their fraudulent practices that are upsetting me, and probably upset Impact Team, which is even worse. Should Ashley Madison be shut down altogether?
In the last several weeks, the Ashley Madison hacking scandal has dominated the headlines. Now, the hackers speak out.
They call themselves the Impact Team and they talked about their incredible hack via email to Motherboardvice.com. So far they dumped 10GB of customer information, 20GB of internal data, and made a third break-in as well. Over 38 million customers of the adulterous website has been affected. The Impact Team start out by insisting they didn’t blackmail anybody. They claim Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media did the blackmailing. They say the hook up site’s security was so bad that nobody was watching. In the Impact Team’s arsenal are employee documents, user pictures, user messages and chats. They accuse Avid Media Life of making $100 million a year in fraud. The Impact Team says Avid Media goes beyond promoting adultery. They say Avid Life exploit their customers like drug dealers exploit their addicts. We haven’t heard the last of the Impact Team. Their mission is to go after any company or any powerful person who profits from destroying others. They even talked about going after corrupt politicians. They picked a great time to do so. Let me just say, if they do go after corrupt politicians, they’ve got a lot of work to do.
My eighth grade language arts teacher used to say, “Life is the sum of all your choices”. That’s playing out right before our eyes. Some may ask, “How is Ashley Madison profiting from destroying others?” That’s what extramarital affairs do. They destroy the people committing them. They destroy ?spouses. They destroy children. They break up households. They cause emotional wounds that may never heal. I‘ve read stories where adulterous affairs led to murder and/or suicide. And for a company to profit off this kind of pain and suffering is disgraceful. Is the Impact Team justified for hacking Ashley Madison?
Samsung, one of the biggest phone makers today and of all-time, is facing a problem. In fact, Samsung faces 600 million problems.
Let me explain. There is a default keyboard threat facing as many as 600 million Samsung phones. The pre-installed SwiftKey keyboard looked for language updates while over unencrypted territory and in plain text. This leaves the door open to create phony proxy servers. These servers can send malware to venerable devices and data to keep bad code on the device. That way, they can further exploit the users’ device. Do you know the power this gives a hacker? They can exploit this keyboard mishap and get a Samsung user’s name, address, email, SSN, text messages, bank information, social media passwords, and anything else they want. Not only that, the malware can be used to spy on users near and far, invading privacy. This discovery was made by Ryan Welton, a security expert representing a firm called NowSecure. Welton talked about the potential attack at a Blackhat Security Summit. According to NowSecure CEO Andrew Hoog, this threat likely affected Samung Android devices like S3, S4, S5, Galaxy Note 3, and Galaxy Note 4. A SwiftKey spokesperson said they are investigating this threat. The spokesperson also said SwiftKey apps on Google Play and the App Store isn’t affected by this threat.
Let me make it clear: This is just a warning. The cyber attack hasn’t happened and it isn’t happening now. So don’t go throwing away your Samsung Galaxy phones away. But you should be alerted of this threat. Some have said to me, “Talking about the threat will give hackers ideas.” Believe me, they’ve already thought of this. Ryan Welton is investigating and bloggers like me are reporting this because you need to know. Now what is SwiftKey going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?
US law officials suspect Chinese hackers compromised four million people by breaking into their business computers. If such suspicions turn out to be true, then this would be one of the biggest government breaches of all-time.
The FBI believes the victims are employees of the Office of Personnel Management. They’re responsible for the federal government’s human resources, background checks and job training, among other things. It’s unclear what was stolen, but the cyber attacks began in April and May 2015. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has all but denied these allegations, claiming China opposes all forms of hacking. The Office of Personnel Management was allegedly hacked last year; it’s believed this is a different incident. The White House and other government entities often urge private companies to do a better fighting hacks. But this isn’t the first time the government has struggled with it’s own data security issues. The Department of Homeland Security said they discovered the breach through a data system called Einstein, a system known for identifying cyber intruders, especially on the Federal level. Office of Personnel Management insists they’re taking steps to improve their security so such breaches don’t keep happening. But Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) sums up what most Americans are already thinking: We expect federal agencies to be among the most protected.
In the past several years, China and the US have been beefing over cyber security issues for several years now. Not only that, there’s been an intense conflict of words over the South China Seas. With these events, China could very well be a prime suspect. If you’re buying China’s stance against hacking, I have some oceanfront property in Kansas I’d like to sell you. But Rep. Schiff has a great point. Think about how much sensitive data comes through government servers on a daily basis. Now think about if this sensitive gets into the wrong hands. I shutter to think what our enemies could do with this. The US needs to do a far better job protecting their agencies and their employees. This is why I’m considering starting a petition and sending it to my local representatives addressing this critical issue. If the Feds can’t protect their own computer systems, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Some go on dating sites to find true love, some go to find friends. Some go to find something a little wilder. Those sites offering something wilder are at risk.
Dating site Adult Friend Finder has been hacked. Nearly four million accounts have been compromised. Before you panic too much, Adult Friend Finder boasts well over 60 million users. But what makes this cyber leak more intense is the information on this site. Adult Friend Finder caters to those looking for…how do I put this…hook ups and casual relationships. So in this case, peoples’ most intimate and sexual information is compromised and in the hands of cyber criminals. One major concern is sextortion. These criminals are going to hold such sexual information at random and release it if they don’t get what they want. Within hours of this leak, the hackers themselves said they were going to hit victims with spam. Cyber security experts believe they’ll fish through these emails looking for people to blackmail. ?The adult dating site is taking the leak seriously. A spokesperson said, “We have already begun working closely with law enforcement and have launched a comprehensive investigation with the help of leading third-party forensics expert.We pledge to take the appropriate steps needed to protect our customers if they are affected.”
I found an interesting statistic. On Adult Friend Finder, there’s one female user for every 16 male users. That’s just one reason to leave these adult websites alone. That’s too much competition. And you never know what you’re getting. You think getting hacked is bad? I remember a news story about one sociopath who used online services to find women, only to kill and rob them! Then he took his own life! Now I’ve always hated the ‘blame the victim’ mentality. The main culprit are these cyber criminals. I hope these criminals are arrested and convicted for these heinous actions and putting innocent people at risk. But let’s choose our online social life carefully. Whatever happened to just meeting people the good old fashioned way…in person?
I read a scary statistic this morning. The year 2014 turned out to be the biggest year in cyber hacks and attacks. They cost businesses and individuals billions, not to mention the personal mayhem they cause people.
Now we learn cyber attacks are costing our medical system. In fact, hacks against the health care industry have doubled so far in the 2010s. Nobody is immune. It’s estimated 90% of the health care industry got breached in the past two years. These criminal cyber attacks costs medical care providers $6 billion a year. It took an episode like a major hack like what happened to Anthem Inc. to wake many experts up to this threat. There’s a reason cyber criminals salivate over medical records, which contain social security numbers and not to mention intimate details about your health. Medical records sell 20 times as much as credit card information. The thief can open up a credit line or get free medical care by using the victim’s insurance ID. Well, free for the criminal; the victim and victim’s insurance company would be paying for it. In 2014 alone, around 88 million people’s information were compromised. That’s double the number of victims in 2010. And 2015 is already even worse. This year 80 million Anthem records were compromised. So were 11 million Premara Blue Cross records. You do the math.
My question is: Why isn’t the media talking about this? It’s one thing for credit cards to be compromised. But when medical records are compromised, health and life are on the line. If somebody’s medical records are compromised, someone could get misdiagnosed, and accidentally killed because of mixed records caused by cyber criminals. Of course I doubt cyber criminals care if their victims live or die. But the tech world and the media must let the public know of such dangers in the medical community. And they need to be taught how to protect themselves. What is it going to take?
