541–550 of 874 posts
Freeze your credit people! It's super easy. It's not a perfect fix but it's so trivial to do and it will help. https://www.usa.gov/credit-freeze You can unfreeze through an app whenever you want/need to.
Credit companies take our data, without consent or compensation, then turn around and charge you if you want to prevent abuse of that collection. It's a racquet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the implicit assumption is that the vast majority of these breaches are obviously preventable (basic incompetence like leaving a non-password-protected database connected to the public internet is common). A better analogy is not a bank defending against an army, but a bank forgetting to install doors, locks, cameras, or guards. _Yes_, the criminals are the root cause, but human nature being what it is it's n…
> I think the implicit assumption is that the vast majority of these breaches are obviously preventable (basic incompetence like leaving a non-password-protected database connected to the public internet is common). Some breaches are certainly preventable. But is that the case here? I didn't see the technical details, I think they aren't released yet, but this is the conclusion everyone seems to jump to automatically…
Mind you, Snowflake is the problem here, not AT&T, if it was their leak. AT&T is big enough that no meaningful sanctions will fall on them. It's not like they fell out of the sky and killed a bunch of people.
AT&T has 110 million customers. Let's be optimistic and assume that each customer only has to spend one minute of extra time managing their account due to the break-in. That is more than 209 years of lost time. Laws related to data breaches need to have much sharper teeth. Companies are going to do the bare minimum when it comes to securing data as long as breaches have almost no real consequences. Maybe pierce the c…
But hey, in 5-7 years there will be a settlement to the inevitable class action lawsuit and each of these customers (that fills in a form, ensuring only a small fraction actually do) gets a $3.75 credit on their next bill. The lawyers will get 30% of the settlement and each walk away with several million dollars. Justice! chef’s kiss
Like, it might be an unending atrocity beyond all human comprehension, but, $666/hr soothes a lot of conscience and quiets a lot of tongues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of breaking them up is supposed to be not letting them re-consolidate. Mergers involving any entity that already has 15% market share should just be flatly disallowed.
This is not the AT&T Judge Harry Greene broke up. This AT&T is a roll up of most of the RBOCs the breakup created.
Not really the point though, is it.
Consumers are so numb to data breaches that these events now bring very little outrage. I think without that anger from the consumer, there's little incentive for companies to do more to stop data breaches from happening.
I think many companies think they can solve this issue by throwing money at their cyber security teams. It just happens that cyber security teams are often ineffective.
Good cyber security people are expensive because they are highly skilled: they typically need to have been a software engineer to understand software architectures and have intuition about them, have spent significant time sharpening their skills at hacking by participating in CTFs, and have probably also spent significant time doing reverse engineering and have a few CVEs attributed to them. (Why are these skills needed? Because they are the skills needed by the red team. Every company that takes cyber security seriously will have a red team.) Now tell me whether these people are worth $500,000 per year.
AT&T has 110 million customers. Let's be optimistic and assume that each customer only has to spend one minute of extra time managing their account due to the break-in. That is more than 209 years of lost time. Laws related to data breaches need to have much sharper teeth. Companies are going to do the bare minimum when it comes to securing data as long as breaches have almost no real consequences. Maybe pierce the c…
Penalties would also incentivise businesses to hide data breaches.
Meanwhile, currently businesses are doing shit all about data breaches except handing out the absolutely useless "2 years identity monitoring", so from a consumer view it really can't get much worse.
In general, the idea that penalties make people hide their bad behavior, so we shouldn't penalize bad behavior, is just extremely misguided. Because without penalties, we normalize bad behavior.
AT&T has 110 million customers. Let's be optimistic and assume that each customer only has to spend one minute of extra time managing their account due to the break-in. That is more than 209 years of lost time. Laws related to data breaches need to have much sharper teeth. Companies are going to do the bare minimum when it comes to securing data as long as breaches have almost no real consequences. Maybe pierce the c…
Everyone says what needs to happen. Every thread has this same exact post. We all know what needs to happen. How _would_ this ever happen? This is a board of innovators -- innovate!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ATT could be using Snowflake for internal analytics
It's not "internal analytics", because a) 90% of the data was former customers and b) it has location data but timestamps were removed, so it's social-graph information plus location. Start asking yourself what sorts of end-users want to pay for the entire social-graph of 77m, regardless whether those customers never make a phone call again. "Alternate credit scoring, hyper-targeted marketing and more... an emerging…
AT&T has 110 million customers. Let's be optimistic and assume that each customer only has to spend one minute of extra time managing their account due to the break-in. That is more than 209 years of lost time. Laws related to data breaches need to have much sharper teeth. Companies are going to do the bare minimum when it comes to securing data as long as breaches have almost no real consequences. Maybe pierce the c…
Maybe a reasonable first step is third-party standards, audits, and certifications around data security to make privacy- and security-conscious consumers aware of what a company is doing. If consumers really find value in that, then they will preferentially deal with that company, and other companies will follow suit.
AT&T has 110 million customers. Let's be optimistic and assume that each customer only has to spend one minute of extra time managing their account due to the break-in. That is more than 209 years of lost time. Laws related to data breaches need to have much sharper teeth. Companies are going to do the bare minimum when it comes to securing data as long as breaches have almost no real consequences. Maybe pierce the c…
But hey, in 5-7 years there will be a settlement to the inevitable class action lawsuit and each of these customers (that fills in a form, ensuring only a small fraction actually do) gets a $3.75 credit on their next bill. The lawyers will get 30% of the settlement and each walk away with several million dollars. Justice! chef’s kiss