A while back my gmail account was hacked by someone with a chinese IP. It made me wonder.
What if they goal of all this is to build a giant database of identities and known passwords. Say the chinese govt has 50 million online identities each associated with an email address, and known passwords for each.
If they do decide to launch a massive cyber attack, it doesn't matter what security we have in place; they could just log in.
They wouldn't need to find backdoors, they could log in as customers to every major bank and start moving things around. It wouldn't matter if the banks caught it, the only way to stop it would be to shut down all transaction--which would cause the panic the attackers are looking for.
They could do this with any public website, and with enough computing power and bandwidth, do it fast enough to really cause a problem.
Just imagine if they had 0.1% of all public logins and passwords.
Same thing happened to me last year. Freaked me out, I know that that password was the same for a few sites (I know I know but I keep a few levels of passwords) So they had to obtain it from one of those. I never received a message from anywhere telling me that my info had been leaked which means some sites I vist I can't trust. I have no way of knowing which.
What if they goal of all this is to build a giant database of identities and known passwords. Say the chinese govt has 50 million online identities each associated with an email address, and known passwords for each.
If they do decide to launch a massive cyber attack, it doesn't matter what security we have in place; they could just log in.
They wouldn't need to find backdoors, they could log in as customers to every major bank and start moving things around. It wouldn't matter if the banks caught it, the only way to stop it would be to shut down all transaction--which would cause the panic the attackers are looking for.
They could do this with any public website, and with enough computing power and bandwidth, do it fast enough to really cause a problem.
Just imagine if they had 0.1% of all public logins and passwords.