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The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is a story we hear repeated far too often in the press. A company, or in this case, a non-profit, seemed to believe itself to be immune from hacking because it’s performing a worthy mission. Under the misguided belief that nobody would hack them because they’re doing a good deed, their security was minimal, and they got hit.<\/p>\n
No One Is Immune<\/strong><\/p>\n It is true that there’s a certain class of hacker who wouldn’t bother with a company that had no real protection. They wouldn’t bother because there’s no challenge in it. Sadly, this does not describe all hackers. There are plenty of the other sort who will hit a company just because they can, as the folks at Goodwill recently learned.<\/p>\n Every company has enemies. Every company is vulnerable on some level. It’s naive to think otherwise, and yet, we see that attitude in the market every single day.<\/p>\n In this particular instance, the individual consumers did not help themselves at all. Many of the accounts compromised were compromised by simple reuse. In other words, because individual consumers tend to reuse the same password for multiple accounts, once a hacker breaks into one account that they own, the rest of their accounts become easy pickings.<\/p>\n Twin Problems<\/strong><\/p>\n Here then, we’ve got two core issues in play. Individually, either of these issues are bad news, both for agencies (for profit or otherwise) and for the individuals who use those agencies. Taken together, however, they are just simply ruinous.<\/p>\n Companies that exist in a state of denial and who cannot or will not take basic steps to protect themselves set themselves up to be easy pickings for even moderately talented hackers. Consumers who use those unprotected or under protected agencies and recycle the same passwords from one account to the next open themselves up to tremendous personal and financial exposure and potential loss.<\/p>\n