I always enjoy reading about hackers and their stories about late night sneaking through the cyber backdoors of some of the world's largest organisations. While it gives me hope that the brilliant mind can still stick it to Big Brother, it also makes me lose faith in well.. cyber security.
Take this excerpt from the book Kingpin by a guy hardly anyone of us would know of. The systematic, large scale stealing of credit card information from restaurant transactions. All he needed was for you to pay with your credit card at a pizza place and he would be able to sell your information to a credit card counterfeiter.
When I bought this T-shirt online with my credit card, I was prepared to have $60 (and the rest of my bank balance) totally disappear. But the cyber gods smiled down, the T-shirt arrived 2 days later, and my bank account was intact.
Even with this vote of confidence, I'm still skeptical of internet security. Unless needed, I will try to keep my private information off the internet completely. But in such an inter-connected world, where signing off at a restaurant could mean signing off your bank balance, really how safe are we?
Yeah right.
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