Kyle Milliken – you’ve probably never heard of him. Still, if you’ve been on the Internet for any period of time, you’ve almost assuredly seen his work. Kyle is a hacker who, according to his blog, hacked a ton of websites, including: airbnb.com, bitly.com, disqus.com, dropbox.com, facebook.com, flickr.com, groupon.com, imgur.com, kickstarter.com, kik.com, linkedin.com, netlog.com, okcupid.com, pinterest.com, rediff.com, reverbnation.com, shopify.com, vimeo.com, vine.co, voxer.com, wehearit.com, wix.com, and yelp.com. Through hacking websites and emails accounts, he became one of the most prolific spammers on the Net. At times, he was making tens of thousands of dollars a day.
Kyle did eventually get caught and he went to jail. He was just released on August 21, 2019 and he says he has changed his ways. But, why would you care about his story? Let’s look at it this way, if the fox finds a way into the hen house, who better to ask how to protect it than the fox?
Milliken explains in his blog that one of the reasons he was successful was because computer users often use the same password for different accounts. Once he hacked a user’s login, he simply tried the same password on other sites and, often, he was in. Alarmingly, he says about 20% of computer users have the same password on many, if not all, of the sites to which they log in. In fact, in an interview with ZDNet, he had this to say: “The reuse of login credentials in my opinion is the greatest security flaw that we have today.”
So, what do we recommend? 1) Use secure passwords or, better yet, use a password manager and let the manager create them; 2) Use different passwords for every site; 3) If the site provides the opportunity, turn on multi-factor authentication – this can be text messages to your cell phone or, better yet, using an authentication app like those available from Google and Microsoft.
Of course, along with secure passwords, you can help fight spammers by not clicking unknown links in emails and not opening attachments you weren’t expecting.
