Security hacks will be even worse in 2018 (The 3:59, Ep. 327)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 3:59. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Alfred Ng. We're getting to the end of the year which gives us a chance to reflect on 2017 and wow, were things bad from a security front. We saw a big security breach or hack in every month through November And our own Laura [UNKNOWN] predicts things will get even worse in 2018. [UNKNOWN] you wrote the big piece looking back at 2017, what were some of the big low lights for you? Well this one sticks out in particularly to me just because it's so fresh, but Apple with it's root Issue- Yeah. Where you can type in route as a user name and not require a password. They've sinced patched it. But there's also been a lot of reports about how the patch doesn't entirely work. But that to me is a major low point for security only because it's such a high profile issue Right. That Had, it was so exploitable. It was so stupid. Although to be fair, you physically had to be in front of the machine for that to work. Yeah. I'm surprised you didn't mention Equifax, for me that's sort of the no-brainer. Yeah, that would be the other one. Right? Just losing your social security information is Is never a thing.>> Yeah and just the issue with that though in terms of security was that this was taken based off the Apache Straps exploits whcih had been warned, Equifax had been warned about in Match and they were supposed to patch it,I think that's the collapse of a lot of security issues that you see from the past year Human error, essentially yeah. Nobody is packing these things, or people are making these very small mistakes. You will get WannaCry security low point that it happened. That had also been patched by Microsoft, but it also targeted really old computer systems that you found at hospitals, universities, ATM machines that just never updated "So yeah, you can attribute a lot of that to just lack of patching." "Sadly, it's not really the computers that are failing, it's us that's failing." "Failing to update the computer, yeah." "So, I mean, what are some of the tips and advice that you'd offer to our viewers or our listeners -" on how to protect yourself. Well, taking a look at all the points that I just made, I think the biggest issue that you want to take here is to patch your systems as soon as they're available. I know a lot of people often look at updates and don't know what they're for or anything like that. To be fair, it's not explicitly stated in these updates, but Most of the times [UNKNOWN] fix security issues and you should handle that. Right. As soon as you can. Kind of avoid suspicious looking emails. A tip that I had heard essentially is don't click on links in emails and just kind of go to the website yourself. Other people for security breaches like if they lose your birthday or if they lose your address or anything like that. They've suggested putting a fake birthdate on like, Facebook or [CROSSTALK], to kind of prevent that. It's really to test my real friends. Yeah, that too. [LAUGH] Well, beyond some of the other, Laura had a couple of good tips, right? Use they have two factor authentication. This is really dumb, but back up your information. Back up your photos. Mm hm. Back Don't just rely on passwords and just generally use common sense, right? Yup, essentially. Okay, continuing with our retrospective theme we wanted to talk about the other look at Google, Facebook, and Twitter this year it's really 2017 was kind of the year that people sort of turned on these companies. You know, they're sort of held up as the bastion of our future, our potential, right? Silicon Valley as kind of. Is a great thing. And really, over the last couple months, they've been taking a pounding, right? Yeah, for or awhile it had exclusively been Twitter. Twitter had been kinda the pinata of sorts of these things. Yeah, it's where racists and bullies My espionage stuff, it's more like there was the child abuse platform- Right. That was going on on Youtube, and all these issues. And the idea is like, these platforms have gotten so large that they can't police themselves to this degree anymore. Right, and I mean, look, we didn't even bring up Russia, which I mean, they'd spent hours testifying before Congress trying to explain themselves. Really not really doing a great job of it. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it, like I said, because they've grown way too big to manage everything on their platforms. Yeah. All right. For those stories and more, check us out on Cnet. I'm Roger Chang. I'm Alfred Ang. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]