Three lessons were learned at Philips in the last few years that we can all benefit from too.

The lessons were learned by both Philips internal computer security staff and their account holders (customers and employees). The first 3 lessons came from a relatively new collective of digital malicious malcontents (erroneously called hackers) that calls themselves “R00tbeersec”.

A not-so-new vulnerability hit the headlines again. UPnP (Universal Plug N Play) has been misused and reported as a major security problem since about 2001. But now, the Department of Homeland is suggesting people disable it.

About 2001 is the time when I started seriously studying security and I remember wondering how someone could not see it as a threat. Being able to remotely discover the capabilities of a firewall/router/switch was bad enough, but you could actually use UPnP to turn on or alter certain capabilities.

South Carolina recently announced that the South Carolina Department of Revenue (SCDOR) was broken into and many of the taxpaying citizens have had their Social Security and/or Credit/Debit Cards numbers stolen.

3.6 million Social Security Numbers (SSN) and 386,000 Credit/Debit Card Numbers (CCN) were stolen in a state with a population of 4.7 million. And any person or business who has filed with South Carolina since 1998 is at risk.

In August of 2012, The Wired.com writer Mat Honan's online life was attacked and torn to pieces. this isn't the first or only thing we've learned from Matt Honan since he writes articles for Wired.com.

Last June (June 2012) over 6 million passwords for linkedin and last.fm were leaked and the passwords have been under study ever since.
According to antivirus software provider ESET, the 25 most common passwords are easy to guess.

There is an article on the Linux Journal about a relatively new service, bitcoin, which at first glance looks like an invitation for misuse or out right abuse. Bit coin basically pays people to avail their computers to others to break cryptographic keys. Well, what is the purpose of those keys? Are those hash passwords or credit card information?

ID theft can impact your monetary situation like having money stolen from your bank account, your credit ratings ruined, an increase in your income taxes due. It can also hurt you in less tangible ways like keeping you from getting a job.

The need to protect one's name is nothing new. Even Shakespeare talked about it.

Mystic lessons from Gawker passwords, gawker, gnosis, encryption, 4chan

The security industry is panicking this week because of the breach at Gawker. Gawker, a National-Enquirer wannabe is a site with nine popular Blogging systems. It has had its whole password database stolen which included millions of its users email and passwords. Twitter, Yahoo, World-of-Warcraft, LinkedIn and more are all requiring some to reset their passwords if you are on the list.

How many sites have important or private information that is protected with a password? If you cut-n-paste your password, your password will be readable and your information will be stealable.