Phishing and Internet Security

October 12, 2005 Posted by mitch | technology | 0 Comments

I ran accross this article today and find it very interesting that the employees of the IRS are just willy nilly giving away passwords. This is your tax information people! And for those that don't know, IT personel *NEVER* need your password. Why you may ask... if they *really* needed to get into your account they'd reset the password themselves. Generally they have known test accounts however, and these are used for situations that call for them. So everyone knows, never give your password to anyone, over the phone or through email, IM or anything else. There really is no need for such situations. The Idea of computer security has been on my mind for a while now. Its a constant battle over how much do you really entrust to users, if they're just going to give away passwords to the first person that asks no matter what the excuse. Some system administrators take this very seriously and watch every move users make, others take a very lax approch to it. I'm still on the fence at what I will be, and since I don't have any 'users' other than myself on my systems, its very easy to know whats going on on them :)