30 May 2015

On 10 June 2014 I wrote my first post on this blog about the eBay data breach, which was published on 21 May 2014. This Thursday, nearly a year later, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data breach was made public. Cyber attackers used personal information mined from other attacks, even perhaps from the eBay attack, to breach the “Get Transcript” accounts of more than 100,000 taxpayers.

Jose Pagliery wrote on CNN Money on May 26, 2015: “The IRS said criminals were able to use the Get Transcript service, because they plugged in personal data they had already stolen: Social Security numbers, birthdays, physical addresses and more. They even answered correctly those personal identity verification questions — the ones we all know as being too specific, annoying and difficult to answer ourselves.”

FIDO U2F Security Key

Well said, those identity verification questions are really annoying. And inherently unsafe, as we learned from a Google study published this week.

And yet the obvious solution would be to discard all those questions and to use Two Factor Authorization instead. For example a FIDO U2F security key in combination with a one-time PIN or fingerprint would be a nearly unbreakable and cheap solution.

How many data breaches must still take place before organizations seriously start securing their customers personal data?

Have a good weekend!