Cyber crime continues and now it has targeted Comcast usernames and passwords.
Around 700 of America’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) Comcast’s subscribers’ user names and passwords have been lying vulnerable on the internet for the last 2 months.
The list of compromised passwords was discovered earlier this week on document-sharing site Scribd by Kevin Andreyo, an educational technology specialist, and a professor at Wilkes University.
Andreyo was reading an article about search engines and how capable they are to dig out deep dark information – that’s when he happened to open a link for a ‘people search engine’ called Pipl. After searching for his email address on Pipl, he discovered the things about him that were online, which included his Comcast user name and password.
After research, Comcast has come to a conclusion that the exposition of usernames and passwords happened due to a phishing or malware scam.
Jennifer Khoury, a Comcast spokeswoman has said “We have scrubbed the list that was on ScribD and have found that about 700 names are user ID’s that are for Comcast customers not 8,000. The other names on the list are not customers, duplicates or older inactive accounts (no e-mail address currently).
The company is now planning to urge their customers to avail the MacAfee Security Suite which is free for download for Comcast services subscribers.
It just gets better doesn’t it?
‘Big Brother’ is watching and with Google now using ‘targeted’ advertising they have a wealth of information collated on users and over time more users will become victims of ID Theft as ISP’s become targets.
As for Comcast urging customers to download McAfee, that won’t stop the problems as security suites are not as effective as a layered approach, but if users ID’s have been compromised it won’t be of any use whatsoever.
It’s like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted!
We live in a crazy digital world. :)