Month: November 2016

Corporate Data Breaches: What They Mean for Us

Entrepreneurship, Media

Part III in a series on personal online security. Parts I and II can be found here and here.

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What’s it gonna take?

That’s the question we’re all asking after the countless cyber attacks on the world’s most powerful corporations. The Sony Pictures hack got a lot of attention for the 47,000 embarrassing executive emails and celebrity Social Security numbers dumped onto the Internet. But check out this list of high-profile hacks and how many records were breached:

  • Michaels Stores, Inc. — 2 million
  • JP Morgan — 83 million
  • Home Depot — 109 million
  • Target — 110 million
  • eBay — 145 million
  • Adobe — 152 million
  • Court Ventures (Experian) — 200 million

We’re talking credit card data, home addresses, checking account numbers–everything an identity thief dreams of at night.

For this post I had planned on listing all the household-name companies hacked in recent years. But it would be way easier to list the handful that weren’t hacked. One prominent cyber security analyst claims 97% of all companies have had their servers broken into.

What’s it gonna take for them to do better?

Actually, that’s the wrong question. We now know the biggest, most powerful companies don’t have our backs regarding Internet security. We also know, by the sheer scale of these attacks, that we have all been touched by these crimes, if not directly, then via someone close to us.

So, the real question is, What’s it gonna take for us to take better care on our own initiative?

(Image:  yuhootech.com)

Ethical Wool?

Health

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I’ve recently blogged about my newfound love of woolen activewear (the flipside of which is my move away from synthetic fabrics). Here’s an update to that post.

As a winter cyclist I’m amazed at the high-performance qualities of wool. But my attention has been drawn to the question of wool as an ethical product. Can one choose wool ethically?

Yes. Or at least wool can be relatively ethical, compared with the wool fiber industry of only a few years ago. Back then it was impossible for apparel manufacturers to fully trace the supply chain of raw wool. In other words, even if manufacturers wanted to offer garments made of ethical wool, the info did not exist for them to avoid “mulesed” wool. Mulesing is the horribly inhumane animal farming practice defined here.

Nowadays an industry initiative called Zque guarantees the supply of certified, non-mulesed wool. Patagonia, Ibex, and Smartwool now use Zque suppliers, exclusively. The manufacturer Icebreaker Merino has mounted a similar effort called BaaCode.

None of this completely resolves the question of wool as an ethical choice. There’s still the issue of animal cruelty in shearing operations, not to mention the bigger question mark of humane animal treatment in mass production, in general. But it is progress.

[Image credit: Pixabay]