March 4, 2020
I chose this article because it outlines the failure of email passwords. Most people can relate to someone trying to access your gmail account without your permission. This has happened to me several times. However, my account never managed to be hacked. The author wants the reader to learn a lesson. That would be to use strong passwords because the weak ones are easier to predict.
According to the article, in the 2019 FBI Crime Report “the most destructive cyber crime for 2019 in terms of money stolen isn’t something flashy like ransomware that is always making the news. It was business email compromise and email account compromise”. I did not find this shocking at all. Once you have a persons email, you have access to everything. You also have the ability to change the passwords to all their accounts and access their payments data. This has apparently caused two billion dollars in losses.
Hacker have even found ways to sidestep the two-step verification process. They use SIM swapping. “In a SIM swap scam, hackers trick a carrier to switch a victim’s mobile number over to an account that the hackers own.” Apparently, this is quite easy to do because people get new phones very frequently. Once this is done they can easily acquire any other information that they desire.
Carri Writes 