Many security and privacy researchers expect a cyber-breach event that will make the hack of infidelity site Ashley Madison look like a footnote by comparison. It could affect not just people seeking extramarital affairs, but everyone in America.
Even more daunting, it could be under way already, and we don’t even know it, say computer security experts.
It’s difficult to pick the worst-case scenario for this breach, as each could be devastating in a different way. It might involve the revealing of everything from shopping habits to the complete Web browsing histories of many Americans. It could put national security in jeopardy by giving hackers the ability to create spear-phishing attacks—in which people are tricked into compromising their computers via emails from businesses that look legitimate—containing so much personal detail that even the most paranoid of government employees or contractors could be fooled.
These security experts say we have unwittingly built the most perfect online surveillance system ever contemplated—for bad guys.
“What more could you want if you wanted to gather intelligence on our citizens?” saysGrady Summers, chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc. “You’d want to see everything they do on the Web, everything they’re buying. We’ve built this incredible machine that does that and we don’t even realize it.”
What Mr. Summers and many others are talking about is the potential for hackers to gain access to enormous and—by design—poorly understood databases containing just about everything there is to know about everyone, gathered from sources as disparate as store loyalty cards, public records and our behavior on the Internet.
The players in this industry, called data brokers, were the subject of a 2014 report by the Federal Trade Commission, in which the U.S. agency recommended that Congress move to require brokers be more transparent about what they gather and how they obtain it.
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