Hacking attack have became all to common in the news as of late. Some have been fairly harmless, such as, when Burger King's twitter account was hacked and had their logo replaced with McDonald's logo. Sometimes it is a group wanting to bring attention to a cause, such as, when the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the New York Times' website to bring attention to the crisis in Syria. Then there are type like the one Adobe reported Thursday saying that hackers stolen credit & debit card information of some 2.9 million customers.
"Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders," Brad Arkin, Adobe's chief security officer, wrote in a security alert.
The software company has said that they have been contacting everyone that was a victim and offering them one year of a credit monitoring service. According to their blog they are also working to tighten security to prevent things like this from happening in the future. Unfortunately with everything the company is doing it can not say with 100% certainty that this will never happen again since battling hackers is always an ongoing problem.
Customers that might be hesitant about making online purchases need to know there are a few steps they should take as well to prevent anyone getting ahold of their critical information. You should check into your debit or credit card provider’s policy on how they handle reported fraud, always use a site, such as, paypal so you do not have to enter in your critical information on every site where you make purchase and always make sure the site where you are making your purchase is secure.
How do I make sure it is secure you might ask? The short answer is that if the sites address starts with HTTPS instead of a simple HTTP then it is secure. There should also be a little lock symbol next to the address bar.
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