TOBY SHAPSHAK: Liberty hack reveals e-mail’s flaws
E-mail is not a secure means of transmitting private and financial information. You’ve been warned
If there is one good thing to come out of the Liberty Life hacking drama, it is that people may start to realise how insecure e-mail is. First designed as a means to send simple text messages over the nascent network that would evolve into the Internet, e-mail is now the backbone of global communications. E-mail may be a gift for communication between people, but it is also a gift to hackers — who need only to infiltrate our inboxes to get access to our most intimate information. Forget the grandparents getting baby pictures and the rest of us receiving company memos. Think how much confidential data is in the average inbox, information that could easily be used for nefarious purposes by cybercriminals. Banks send us our monthly statements, service providers their monthly bills, financial service providers like Liberty send quarterly and annual updates and cellphone operators send us itemised invoices. If you want to hack someone’s life, hack their e-mail — as was the case with the ...
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