Linux Mint was hacked !!!

[Abarbarian]

They were hacked in 2016 and a backdoor was inserted in the distros .iso.

https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/linux-mint-hack.html

So that is fairly old news.

Imgur was hacked in 2013 so that was fairly old news. However some of the info stolen has just surfaced on the net only last year 2017.

imgur
In September 2013, the online image sharing community imgur suffered a data breach. A selection of the data containing 1.7 million email addresses and passwords surfaced more than 4 years later in November 2017. Although imgur stored passwords as SHA-256 hashes, the data in the breach contained plain text passwords suggesting that many of the original hashes had been cracked. imgur advises that they rolled over to bcrypt hashes in 2016.

Compromised data: Email addresses, Passwords

An a whole load of popular sites have been hacked in a similar fashion. Just how safe is your data on the web and how do you protect your self?


';--have i been pwned?

 

[Becky]

Just how safe is your data on the web

Always assume that it is not

how do you protect your self?

The risk when something gets hacked is that your email and password becomes available, and if you use that same email and password combo somewhere else then that too becomes vulnerable. Therefore the way to protect yourself is to use a different password for everything, so that if one password gets discovered then it cannot be used to access anything else.

It's difficult to keep track of multiple good passwords, so the best thing to do is to use password software. I use KeePass - you have one password that you remember (a long one) and the software holds all your other passwords securely. Each should be different and randomly generated (which the software does for you). The thing I like about KeePass is the data is only stored on your computer / mobile, there is no risk of someone accessing it via cloud storage

 

[Abraham Andres Luna]

It's funny how people forget that most of these backdoors and vulnerabilities were put there on purpose to allow hackers to get into systems. That way they can sell you on firewalls and anti-virus and system recovery software. It's a game is all.

 

[TriplexDread]

Nothing is or will ever be safe.
It is unfortunately one of those things we have to expect and deal with because given enough time, effort and money everything is vulnerable imo

 

[Abarbarian]

It's difficult to keep track of multiple good passwords, so the best thing to do is to use password software. I use KeePass - you have one password that you remember (a long one) and the software holds all your other passwords securely. Each should be different and randomly generated (which the software does for you). The thing I like about KeePass is the data is only stored on your computer / mobile, there is no risk of someone accessing it via cloud storage

Excellent choice.

A heads up for those of you using other os's or dual booting.

KeePassXC is a community fork of KeePassX, a native cross-platform port of KeePass Password Safe, with the goal to extend and improve it with new features and bugfixes to provide a feature-rich, fully cross-platform and modern open-source password manager.

Cross-platform, runs on Linux, Windows and macOS without modifications

 

[floppybootstomp]

Passwords? Call me old school but I have this thing called a contacts/address book and I use an implement called 'a biro' to regularly make entries.

And yes, there's a duplicate in a safe place.

Now then, where the hell is that safe place...?

 

[Becky]

Passwords? Call me old school but I have this thing called a contacts/address book and I use an implement called 'a biro' to regularly make entries.

And yes, there's a duplicate in a safe place.

Now then, where the hell is that safe place...?

But with mine you can copy and paste, whereas you'd need to find some glue to do that with yours