More Citi bank hacks and IPv6 day was yesterday

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Reprint by David:
From: ipv6 yesterday and more citi hacks

Reprinted
Here we go again – Citi bank admits about 1% of it’s credit card customers were hacked …. again…

Really, what more can be said on this subject? Certainly more of these hacks are making the news now, and that’s not a bad thing in one sense – the one aspect that bothers me is that many of these businesses simply don’t care. Clearly Citi would rather save money up front than actually do anything about their security. This, of course, means we’ll be posting about more hacks in the future. Another good reason to reduce your credit card use, if you haven’t already cut them up.

More importantly, what does this mean for your business? Mainly, you should be aware of necessary security for any data you store or collect. If you aren’t aware of your situation, you may wish to hire a network security consultant to go over your weaknesses and decide a course of action…. preferably before you’re hacked.

Next up, happier news! IPv6 day was yesterday – and went along fairly well. If you don’t know what IPv6 is, it’s the new set of Internet numbers which will be required on all devices some time in the near future. The test was run between a number of large and small corporations to see how things would break in a real world test. I’d love to hear from people on their experiences, did you notice weirdness, slow web sites, etc yesterday?

I’ve been running IPv6 audits and tests for a few clients, and while not as urgent as the build up to Y2k, it’s more real of a problem. There are a lot of routers that simply can’t pass IPv6, and tunneling older IPv4 isn’t a solution. So a lot of companies will need to replace chunks of their network infrastructure or fall off the Internet. It will be a most interesting transition.