Yesterday, I talked about the hacking of health insurance provider Anthem, one of the biggest security breaches of all time. Those crooks better hope they never run into Alex Holden, the anti-hacker.
Alex Holden was born in Ukraine in the mid 1970s, then part of ?Soviet Union. As a small child, his family tried, but failed, to move to the US, making life even more difficult under communist law. His parents taught him and his brother chess and other problem solving games in order to exercise their minds. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the family moved first to Italy, then to Wisconsin. There, he found his calling in computers. By the age of 27, he became top information security officer at Robert and Baird Co. In 2013, he started his own security firm after his employer, Cyopsis, split. Soon after, his genius and his skills were needed and needed badly.
Last summer, a network of Russian hackers were very busy. By this point, they accumulated approximately 542 million emails and well over a billion ‘unique records’- things like usernames and passwords. Many of these records were all set to be sold on the black market. Some of these items go for as little as five dollars. Holden and his Hold Security firm shut the biggest password theft operation of all time down, saving countless accounts. And that’s not all. In October 2013, he caught another hacking network breaking into Adobe Systems and compromising over 3 million credit cards. Holden and his team of sixteen caught criminals infiltrating a limo company. These criminals not only leaked credit cards, but scathing information about A-list athletes and other celebrities. There’s plenty more where these stories came from.
I’ve always said that if the criminals are getting stronger and bolder,?we on the side of right have to be stronger and bolder. We need more Alex Holden’s in the technology world today. Where are they?