How They Hacked Paris
posted May 20th 2005 9:00am by Eliot Phillipsfiled under: cellphones hacks
Ugh, I feel dirty just posting a picture of her. The Washington Post has an excellent story about how T-mobile was hacked, which eventually led to Paris Hilton’s account being compromised. I hope you aren’t too surprised when you find out it was just simple social engineering… I mean really simple. No sweet ’sploits, no DDOS, just an attack at the weakest link of a sprawling corporation: the staff. I hope companies take this article to heart and teach their employees how to be more secure. Of course if your staff hates you you’re still screwed.
All this is going to do is to have management force some heavy-handed but ineffective broad stroke changes onto the customer service representatives. This in turn will make dealing with these low-paid and usually unhappy and unhelpful people even less pleasant.
Just think about it, do customer service reps need any more excuses as to why they can’t fix your account or why they’re not allowed to give you that information?
Just look at how the privacy act has impacted the health industry. It is damn near impossible to get a hospital to even admit that a patient has been admitted, much less find out if they’re alive or dead!
I agree that security (especially that surrounding our personal information) is a joke, but unfortunately reactions to these types of events simply tend to exacerbate the problem, not resolve it.
Posted at 11:01 am on May 20th, 2005 by Ed Tapanes