Hacking Is Life

It's happened to everyone at some point on the web. Even to those seasoned and technically-savvy veterans of the Internet.

It is guaranteed to happen to those who surf the Net without a parachute and in complete and total ignorance.

You've been hacked.

It's a good chance everyone who has ever owned a Twitter or Facebook account has been hacked at some point. How? When you don't pay attention to what you are clicking. Some of those too-good-to-be-true or sexy salacious stories come with a hacksaw. You usually know when one of your buddies tells you they've just received some weird message from your account.

How do you get out of a social hack? Change your password. Log out. Log back in with the new password. Use a complicated password, like: iReallywantTogoto1henew5tarwarsMovi7 or something half that long.

You really do need a unique password for every account. Don't use the same one across the board or something simple, like benandsandy if those are your kids' names.

Even if your computer is Fort Knoxed, you can still get hacked. Your information is as secure as the IT from the companies you deal with. If Amazon decides to save money on IT and put it into a new launch instead, unless they have a blackhacker on staff, all their information is put at risk if their IT is not as tip top as they can pay for.

Need an example, besides Sony (which isn't just about movies but also your Playstation)? Here are some biggies:

Netflix
Go Daddy, Dropbox, Nissan, Mastercard, Visa, Reuters... in 2012
Facebook, Microsoft, NBC, Twitter... in 2013
Target, Michaels, AT&T, US and Canadian governments, Home Depot, Apple iCloud... in 2014
Anthem, IRS, JP Morgan Chase, British Airways... most recent

There is no getting around it. The Dark Web, where all of this information gets sold as hackers make money on your behalf, is bigger than the Internet you are currently using.

You can't hide. Even if you decide to put a moratorium on Internet travel, you can't control what other companies do when you shop in person, or how secure your cable company's records are. You can only use best practices and be diligent: strong and unique passwords (so what if you have to write them down in a book), don't do banking from a public wifi (coffee shops, airports), make sure your computer is fully upgraded and not too old for upgrades (I don't use my Windows XP laptop online anymore), have a really good and fully updated antivirus program.

Stop Being Dumb About IT

Target, Home Depot, Sony, and many more have something in common. Someone inside their networks, either internally or via a third-party supplier, opened the door to give free reign to hackers.

Of course, anyone who clicks an unsuspecting malicious link hasn't deliberately put their company at risk. It also does the boss no good if he or she singles out and punishes the employee.

What will lessen the chance of this happening is if your company actually invests money into its IT, rather than just pay lip service with an anti-virus here and a firewall there. That may be okay for one computer but if you have more than one synced to a server, installing more than one level of security will make it more difficult for the bad guys to sneak in.

The other thing you can do is train your staff to be more diligent about what might be construed as a phishing link, whether it is in their social media feeds, email, or from an online search for information. They should also be trained on the art of making up a password. If you have to tattoo it to your elbow to remember, so be it, but the simpler and more obvious the password, the wider the door has been left open.

Alex Holden sniffed down a group of Russian hackers who infiltrated 420,000 websites, stole the credentials, and used them for their spam campaign. In an interview with +Mitch Jackson on +Human.Social  he lists steps you must take if you think you've been hacked.

1. Assess the situation. What was taken? How was it taken? Was there more than one entry point?
2. Preserve the evidence.
3. Get the right people to advise you.
4. The process of recovery is a delicate one and cannot be rushed.

Here is the entire interview.