Countdown to Ruin: Hacked Data Goes Public in As Little as Nine Minutes
How quickly do you think you can cancel your credit card in the event of a hack? In the time it takes you to reach the automated number and enter the right sequence of numbers and options, it may be too late.
Image: Max Pixel
According to a new alert from US-CERT (the Computer Emergency Readiness Team of the U.S Department of Homeland Security), nine minutes is all it takes for your compromised personal information to be widely accessible and for sale to the hacker universe, and for criminals to start trying to use your stolen information. If that information includes usernames and passwords that you use for multiple sites, are you confident that you could change the passwords to all those sites in under nine minutes? Chances are, you won’t even know your information has been hacked in the first nine minutes following the hack.
Your personal information, once hacked, is typically posted online in hacker forums and paste sites such as Pastebin. There, the data is quickly accessed by other criminals in as little as nine minutes, according to FTC researchers who conducted an experiment to track attempts to use stolen information.
Your account information by itself may be worth as little as $2, but it may be very valuable to criminals who can exploit the stolen information while it is still valid. And your information might be packaged with other compromised information in baskets of stolen data for sale – like an Amazon or eBay for hacked data – but accessible to criminals using specialized browsers such as Tor.
To mitigate the risk of identity theft, the FTC recommends using multi-factor authentication where feasible. Passwords are a typical form of single-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication requires one or more additional pieces of information, such as a PIN or one-time code, to verify your identity. This also makes it more difficult for someone who has stolen your username and password to monetize or use that information effectively – because they do not have all the necessary pieces to be able to get into your account.