Internet Security: The Walls Come Tumbling Down…

San Francisco, CAForgive any individual tempted to contact a technology lawyer following the most recent security breach involving major players in the online community, including Yahoo, Gmail and AOL.

The revelation last week that more than 450,000 accounts appeared to have been hacked, exposing user names and passwords, has put more than just online service providers on notice. Rather, the breach to internet privacy has served as a wake-up call to millions of Americans who rely on the internet for banking services and other uses for which highly private and confidential information is both necessary, and assumed completely protected.

The latter doesn’t appear to be the case following the admission last week by a collective of hackers that they had broken into presumably secure accounts using a relatively well-known hacking tool known as SQL injection.

According to various reports, including the New York Times (7/12/12), a hacking collective dubbed D33D appeared to have carried out the deed simply to make a point: that such sites were not as secure as everyone may have thought. "We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat," an online statement from D33D said.

The breach affected, according to various sources, presumably secure data from some 106,000 Gmail e-mail addresses, 55,000 Hotmail e-mail addresses and 25,000 AOL e-mail addresses—among others.

The breach comes just one month after millions of sensitive LinkedIn log ins and passwords were exposed. Such a breach can result in the needless vulnerability to an Internet scam and other unsavory online activity that doesn't stop at identity theft.

Accounts affected included those affiliated with Live.com, Bell South, Verizon, SBC Global, Comcast and Hotmail—along with the aforementioned AOL, Gmail and Yahoo. Companies affected were swift to re-set passwords and other vulnerable data in an effort to tighten security and ease the fears of account users. Google was reported to have immediately reset passwords for any vulnerable Gmail accounts.

Still, what may have private citizens and business people alike running for their e-commerce lawyers were statements by various Internet security denizens who pointed to the relative ease with which the breach was undertaken. "Why haven't organizations like Yahoo got it yet? SQL injection is a known attack," said Mark Bower, a vice president at Voltage Security, in comments published in the New York Times. "If what is stated is true, it's utter negligence to store passwords in the clear."

With e-commerce, financial transactions such as online banking, and the storage and availability of sensitive files such as medical records all residing online, internet privacy is becoming increasingly important, as well as being increasingly taken as a given in this age of a Blackberry-equipped US President. To that end, the fear of internet fraud and a series of significant cracks appearing in the online armor have put millions of people at worry, not to mention prompting a potential call to their IT attorney.