PRIVILEGED IDENTITY MANAGEMENT NEWS LINE
May
2011
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 5 Ways Consumers Can Protect Against Another Sony Breach Philip Lieberman President & CEO Lieberman Software “The shot heard ‘round the world”… Sony has admitted that hackers broke into its PlayStation Network making off with the personal information of more than 77 million members. The breach is being called the fifth largest data breach in history, according to Datalossdb.org, and is making headlines everywhere. So what is the impetus for the attack? According to threatpost.com, speculation is that Anonymous, a collective of hackers, targeted Sony as retaliation for the company’s legal actions against individuals who cracked content protection technology for the PS3 and other products. My take: striking a a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat is never a good idea. Sony’s heavy-handed approach to defending its intellectual property has triggered the “nuclear option” with those that it engaged. Perhaps Sony could learn a few lessons from Microsoft in how it has handled XBOX 360 and Kinect intellectual property. Turning my attention to the 70 plus million people whose personal information has been compromised, here are my suggestions for ways everyone can protect themselves moving forward: 1) Don’t provide your true DOB or other personal information to this type of vendor (i.e. online games). 2) Use a throwaway email account. 3) Use an anonymous payment card for these types of online transactions; many card issuers provide these temporary “virtual account numbers” online. 4) Use a unique password for every site. 5) Always assume that the company gathering your personal information is incompetent at securing the data; consider what you share with them and how you are going to recover your personal identity after they lose your information. The Sony breach is a clear example of what is wrong with the cloud – too much data centralized into a single point and the total lack of transparency of the internal security used to protect it. This is a clear warning that all consumers can expect their most sensitive information to be compromised due to the incompetence of those who seek to reduce costs through haphazard cloud deployments. You’ll hear more from me about cloud security in the future. What are your recommendations for consumers and what do you think Sony’s next move should be? Email me at: phil@liebsoft.com. You can also follow me on Twitter: @liebsoft or connect with me via LinkedIn. You can also read a version of this article in The Wall Street Journal.
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