Just How Safe Is Safe?

You go to a website. It looks interesting. They tell you your information is safe. You enter your information. Some time in the future, you get a letter. Uh oh. Security has been breached. Your information isn't so safe anymore.

Now I don't mean to be a prophet of doom here. This is more the exception than the rule. But, heads up. . .it does happen.

Take SecondLife.com. SecondLife is a three-dimension online world where residents (you) buy and sell virtual land using Linden dollars, which can be redeemed for real currency. The residents are portrayed as animated characters that users design for themselves to interact with other participants.

The site is not all fun and games for some. Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo, along with professional authors, musicians and architects, set up virtual outposts of their organizations or personas in SecondLife to represent themselves inside the online world.

In a letter to its 650,000 users this weekend, Linden Lab, the company behind the "Second Life" site, said that its customer database, including names, addresses, passwords and some credit card data, had been compromised by an intruder.

Whoops! Like I said, I'm not trying to be a fear monger. I just want you to be aware that security breaches can and do happen. So be careful about what you put out there. Have fun, but let's be careful out there!

. . . Stephanie

technorati tags: Internet, Computers, Internet Security, Computers and Internet, Stephanie Trahd
Just How Safe Is Safe