Over and over people tell me that a product, service or other item is secure because someone else important uses it, and they are sooo important that they would never ever use or do anything insecure. So basically what they are saying is that “I trust them so I will do what they do.” The problem with this is they don’t really know how that other person uses a particular product. Perhaps they made a change to make it more secure or made a change and unknowingly made it even worse, or made no changes and it is just a crappy product to begin with!
Lets take for example the millions of people that run their credit cards through POS systems all over the country. Those systems must all be secure right? Banks wouldn’t let those swipe machines be easily hackable would they? Well they would if they were the brand used by Stop & Shop Supermarkets. The POS systems you normally use where secretly replaced by (Folgers Crystals!) hacked POS systems that still validated your purchase but recorded the information for later retrieval. (Pretty cool hack if you ask me.)
But, but, but thats a small company, I only trust big companies since they would never leave their data unsecured! They would if they where TJX who had people rumageing through their network for over 17 months before the breech was discovered.
But those are brick and morter shops, they always have problems. Reputable online companies don’t have those sorts of problems. Maybe not, unless you use products from Intuit whose online TurboTax filing system temporarily exposed tax returns including social security numbers and bank account numbers to anyone who asked. While the time between discovery of the hole and its closure was pretty short it is unknown if it was discovered and abused but not reported even earlier.
Hardware, I trust hardware. All that software stuff is easy to break but give me some good strong hardware anyday. You mean hardware like the Secustick, a USB flash drive that automatically encrypts its contents and supposedly self destructs if tampered with? So secure that even the French governement trusts it? Thats the kind of hardwrae you trust? Not so fast, its pretty trivial to break that as well.
So be careful who you trust, and don’t depend on others to make the decision for you. Treat your data and personal information as sacred. Trust no one.