Target, Anthem, TurboTax and most recently, Ashley Madison, are proof that there is no perfect privacy in the internet world.
These are also tangible harmful cases of extremely motivated hacker groups who seek neither money or exposure.
As the Ashley Madison scandal keeps unravelling, hackers are more than proud to shout-out: “We know all about your browser history.”
With that being said, such groups could expose the private and potentially embarrassing personal data of high profile personalities and everyday people.
Impact Team, the group which last month exposed the personal data of 36 million possible adulterers from the Ashley Madison website, has suggested it is more than possible to do the same with people who access online pornography.
“If a malicious party obtained identifiable access logs for just one of the websites that know your name, and view logs for just one of the adult websites you’ve visited, it could infer with very high probability – beyond plausible deniability – a list of porn you’ve viewed,” says Brett Thomas, a software engineer and bioinformatics analyst.
“All that’s needed are two nominal data breaches and an enterprising teenager that wants to create havoc.
“Many people brushed off the episode, however, recent cyber attacks could result in the next big internet privacy crisis,” Thomas adds.
“I worry about the policy measures that could be hastily enacted in response to such an event – yet another reason that the tech community should take a more proactive approach ensuring data privacy.”
Impact Team of course isn’t the only ideologically motivated group to resort to the public shaming of millions of people and Ashley Maddison is not the only database able to torch someone’s reputation.
“The current business world,” as the Ashley Madison spokesperson said after the breach, “has proven to be one in which no company’s online assets are safe from cyber-vandalism.
“After all, we all have more than one skeleton in our closets.”
Source: Telegraph, Business Insider
