Celebrity hacker Guccifer's confession gives us all a lesson in security

The activity of Romanian hacker Guccifer, who has admitted to compromising almost 100 email and social media accounts belonging to U.S. government officials, politicians, and other high-profile individuals, is the latest proof that humans are the weakest link in computer security.

Marcel Lehel Lazar, 44, is not a hacker in the technical sense of the word. He’s a social engineer: a clever and persistent individual with a lot of patience who a Romanian prosecutor once described as “the obsessive-compulsive type.” By his own admission, Lazar has no programming skills. He didn’t find vulnerabilities or write exploits. Instead, he’s good at investigating, finding information online and making connections.

Lazar pleaded guilty Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to charges of unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3075...ession-gives-us-all-a-lesson-in-security.html

 

Isn't that scary? Someone with no programming skills and still able to hack into accounts! It is a good lesson for us all to be more careful, but then it depends on those websites that we signed with too to tighten theirs security!

 

Hacking is here to stay unfortunately. It is up to each of us to be thoughtful about what we type and what we store in our computers. We are the best one's to watch out for ourselves.