This infograph and post from Richard Sharp, a writer over at gadgetsandgizmos.org, serves as a good reminder of how vulnerable our information can be online.
This year has seen the rise of hackers in the public eye, groups such as Anonymous and Lulz Security (Lulzsec) have breached the security of some of the biggest brands on the planet. Yesterday, Lulzsec announced their retirement from hacking, but encouraged their fans and other groups to continue their work. We have created an info graphic, entitled ‘Hack Attack’ to draw together some vital statistics of hackers and online security on the whole.
Lulzsec Section
It was difficult to quantify the extent of Lulzsec’s hacks, some have been claimed by the group whilst other remain a mystery.
We have taken a look at their biggest hacks, including their alleged involvement in the Sony Playstation Network hack (PSN) which resulted in 77 million user accounts being taken from Sony. A UK teenager was arrested last week and has been accused of working with Lulzsec to breach the PSN, it has also been revealed that the group comprised of six members – love them or hate them, you can’t deny the impact these six people have had over the past months.
The info-graphic looks at various attacks, including a hack on the CIA website in which Lulzsec gained access to the site to prove a point that it wasn’t secure enough. The top section of our infographic illustrates just four of the hacks Lulzsec where involved in, you must also be aware that they hacked two other Sony services and releasing 3.5 million Sony music coupon codes and 75,000 music codes to the general public.
Hacking statistics
This section makes for some alarming reading, we discovered that almost one third of people in the US and UK have been a victim of hacking to some extent. This could be a direct hack, or as a result of their details being taken by hackers from a third party. This opened up a whole can of worms as we had to separate out hacking affects with general cyber crime, the statistic showed that 73% of US citizens have been a victim of cybercrime!
We’ve no idea what the recent upscaling in hacking has cost, but in 2008 total losses where $1 trillion. We’d predict 2011 will easily surpass the 2008 mark.
Hackers
There are a lot of hackers around, we have chosen the ones that either got jailed for a long time (top black hatters) or the ones you wouldn’t necessarily consider hackers in today’s criminal sense (white hat). Interestingly a lot of top hackers, whether imprisoned or not often end up with high paying jobs, both Adrian Lamo and Kevin Mitnik fall into this category – don’t care for either of them? Well, George Hotz, AKA Geohot has just bagged a top end job at Facebook after hacking the PS3 and iPhone.
How strong is your password?
People often pick short passwords that are easy to remember, that makes a lot of sense but isn’t all that safe. Research has shown that a lowercase, 6 letter password can be hacked in 10 minutes! At the other end of the scale, a 9 character password which uses upper/lowercase with a mixture of numbers and symbols would take 44,530 years to hack.
