A few months back, as part of my preparation for an Internet safety and security roundtable session in Hongkong, I compiled a list of useful sites on the topic. Over the past few months, there have many more incidents of information breaches been reported in the media in Hongkong, and also other places. While surfing some blog sites earlier, I found that there are also incidents that are closer to the general Internet users, in which their (bad) experiences are reported in their blog sites. As these are real life encounters, without the extra "salts and oils" of news media reporting, I think it might be useful to compile them for people who are not convinced by the media about the importance of taking precautionary and preparatory measures for Internet safety and personal privacy and security protection. While some of the incidents might be trivial, they should serve as a list of case studies useful for awareness briefing, if anyone needs to conduct one in their organization or for their customers:
 
  • Hotmail account being hijacked (extended to eBay account)
  • Phone scam attemping at using overseas colleague's information
  • Blogs deleted with account compromise (password reported as "lost")
  • Lost password, reason unknown and apparently didn't bother to find out
  • Cost of "losing password"</ul>

    It's interesting that the notion of "lost password" as relates by the bloggers is quite different in some of these incidents. They could have been forgotten, or changed by a miscreant hacking into their account, or simply got locked up by the service provider. Perhaps they mean lost in their memory rather than forgotten, or they could have actually written it down somewhere and then lost that note physically.

    I shall update this list as I gather more in the coming weeks/months. If you have one to contribute, leave me a comment here as well.</div>