It doesn't come as a great surprise that if you hire hackers to discover your social security number or other personal information, they will probably succeed. We've heard enough horror stories to know that's true.
Still, I was fascinated by a story by Adam L. Penenberg, the editor of the tech news site Pandodaily, who hired hackers to investigate him–and was surprised, and even humbled, by what they found out. And Penenberg is a savvy guy. He's a professor of journalism at New York University, and he's read all the stories about what hackers can do–but he found their attack on him "chilling."
The fascination is in the details–the stakeouts, the strategically misplaced thumb drive, the cons, and the surprises.
"What I learned," he writes, "is that virtually all of us are vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping and are easy hack targets. Most of us have adopted the credo “security by obscurity,” but all it takes is a person or persons with enough patience and know-how to pierce anyone’s privacy — and, if they choose, to wreak havoc on your finances and destroy your reputation."
It's a long story, but I read it to the end. One tip: Don't ever plug anybody else's thumb drive into your laptop.
-Paul Raeburn
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