It has been an interesting week in Cyber world. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook has had his own personal page and pictures hacked into and released. There are two interesting points about this. Firstly, on the positive side, Mr Zuckerberg actually has enough confidence in his creation that he has a page. Secondly, on the negative side, there are obviously a lot of people that don't like him.
Telstra this week faced a major problem as it was identified that parts of its database were open for all to see. The estimate of people affected range from 100,000 to over 1 million depending on whose spin you listen to. Telstra did the right thing and immediately shut down parts of Bigpond. Of interest was that when I phoned Telstra to find out what was happening, the first person said that they had no idea and that it wasn't a Telstra problem. I phoned a second time. This time I was routed to a call centre in the Phillippines. She was far more frank and said that Telstra had been hacked, they had immediately shut down the system to protect people's data and that it could be three days before the system could be restored.
I am impressed that Telstra actually did what they did.
Vodafone on the other hand had massive outages on Friday across Melbourne. There didn't appear to be any clear answer from the company as to why.
In the end, it raises an interesting point about hackers. I would suggest that there are at least three types.
The first I would compare to a firebug. They hack for the hell of it to see if they can do it. They are not really too concerned about the consequences.
The second is the professional. They are looking for things, people, bank accounts etc.
The third is organised crime. They hack for a range of purposes including identity theft.
The fourth I would suggest is some Governments who actually employ people to do it.
Interesting times.
Stephen Wilcox
Australian Lawyer
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