What You Share Can Be Used Against You...

Your friendly hacker has gathered the data and it can be damaging

I wanted to share a recent experience we had our when we updated our corporate website at Network Thinking Solutions. We support, install and maintain Wordpress for many of our clients for their public websites, blogs, etc. Though, because I am lazy, we never transitioned our corporate public facing website to WordPress.

I recently decided to make the push to get it done and though the website is completed and on WordPress now, I was surprised at how quickly the website was attacked. We have a fairly robust set of tools to monitor, patch and maintain the site but it was enlightening to see the attacks roll in. Our old site did not provide any details but now with WordPress we receive much more visibility.

I was quite surprised though about the patterns of the attacks. For example, my son worked here last year for the summer. My son, being a gamer, has a certain online persona that he uses. Within days, I noticed attempts to login to our site using that persona that only could be used if you somehow knew he worked here and also knew something about him. Kind of scary. In subsequent days I noticed attempts to login using my daughters name who has never worked here. All of these were denied but it was eye opening. It’s also not as if someone was using every name in the dictionary to hit us. Very few logins attempts have been made using names (under 5) and most related to our family.

What can we learn? Your digital footprint is real and if someone is malicious then they will use it against you.

Thanks,
Network Thinking Solutions