In the past few months there have been a number of high-profile companies coming under cyber attack. The most recent one in the deal industry was LivingSocial, in which 50 million user accounts were compromised, with the attackers gaining “unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers,” according to the company CEO.
Thankfully no credit card data was compromised, but this event highlights the significance of online security in the evolving digital age.
Another interesting event in recent weeks happened when the Syrian Electronic Army gained access to the Twitter account of the Associated Press, and tweeted that President Obama was injured in explosions at the White House. The immediate effect of this was that the DOW Jones Industrial Average lost $140 billion, 1% of its value, in just 90 seconds. The DOW quickly corrected itself when traders realized the tweet was fake, but again, this highlights the importance of keeping digital information and websites secure.
We are going to continue seeing news articles about companies see their Twitter and Facebook accounts get hacked. Be sure that whomever has access to your companies social media pages knows the importance of keeping their login credentials secure. Using capital letters and random numbers for your passwords can always help, also.
