REFERENCE: Nicole Perlroth, technology reporter for The New York Times, covers cyber security and privacy for the Bits blog and for print. Before connecting the San Francisco office of The Times in 2011, she was a deputy editor at Forbes where she covered venture capital and Web startups and produced the Midas List, the magazine’s annual ranking of top tech deal makers. Her coverage has ranged beyond technology to topics like food, bioethics and education. Ms. Perlroth is a grad of Princeton University and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
PURPOSE OF STUDY: To have a command about how hacker making everyone feel unsafe.
COMMENTS: Mark Hugh Miller” Internet security is achievable, but many big companies consider it as a non-revenue-producing endeavor and thus do not apply sufficient resources, including people as smart and innovative as those twelve-odd lads in Russia, to make themselves and us secure.”
MAIN POINTS: A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, security researchers say.
The records, discovered by Hold Security, a firm in Milwaukee, include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, including household names, and small Internet sites. Hold Security has a history of uncovering significant hacks, including the theft last year of tens of millions of records from Adobe Systems.
Hold Security would not name the victims, citing nondisclosure agreements and a reluctance to name companies whose sites remained vulnerable. At the request of The New York Times, a security expert not affiliated with Hold Security analyzed the database of stolen