In The News: The New Year Has Hardly Begun and Security Issues Abound

The year has barely gotten off to a start and we’re already dealing with a variety of security breaches such as those with Target and Shapchat. Now the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a Syrian computer hacker conglomerate, is kicking off the New Year with a variety of cyber-attacks. —They have compromised Skype, Twitter, and Facebook accounts.

Social media accounts belonging to Skype, Microsoft’s Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, were hacked today (January 2^nd) at 19:30 GMT. Ironically, the SEA posted a message on Skype’s Twitter account stating: “Stop spying on people! via Syrian Electronic Army.” SEA later re-tweeted the message using its own twitter page.

The SEA is urging people to stop using Microsoft accounts because they say the company is “selling the data to the governments.”

The Take-Home Message

When cleaning out the clutter from the Christmas holidays, you may want to clean up your passwords and usernames for your apps as well, including Skype, Twitter and Facebook.