Archive | August 15, 2005

InfoWorld: Top News notes Hacker found guilty in massive data theft case.

(InfoWorld) – “A Florida man was found guilty of stealing data from customer information management company Acxiom Corp. Friday. The prosecution estimates that Scott Levine and his defunct bulk e-mail marketing firm Snipermail.com Inc. stole more than 1.6 billion customer records by hacking into an Acxiom server.”

… “Levine and other Snipermail staff downloaded around 8.2 gigabytes of personal data from the Acxiom server between April 2002 and August 2003, according to the DOJ.

… “Acxiom said in the statement… “There is no evidence that any individuals are at risk of harm due to the breaches. It is also important to note that only one external server was accessed, and there was no intrusion of Acxiom’s internal security firewalls or internal databases.”

Could someone please explain to me why Acxiom was storing 8.2 gigabytes of personal data in an external server!!!???

Over at InfoWorld: Application development, Steve Fox has a funny and true editorial on IT’s seven dirty words. “Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”?? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven:…”