This is how you do security incident response

Blizzard's Battle.net service got hacked:

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime confirmed on Thursday that Blizzard's Battle.net online service was hacked with email addresses, personal security question answers and authentication data stolen.

...

The list of items illegally acquired by the breach include email address, answers to user's personal security question plus "information relating to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators."

That's the bad news.  The good news is that Blizzard is aggressively taking the right steps:

Despite these assurances, the company asks that you change your Battle.net password by clicking this link. If you used the same password else, Morhaime encourages you to change that too.

Blizzard will be releasing an update to Battle.net in the next few days that forces players to change their passwords if they haven't already, change their secret question and answer and prompt users to update their authentication software.

Yup.  It's not rocket surgery, it's just realizing that bad news doesn't improve with age.

Back up your data

Most of you have heard about the hack where the Apple and Amazon cloud services and people lost their data.  The attack wasn't technical, it was "social engineering" - phoning up the services and convincing tech support that you needed your account info ungraded.  Of course, the new infor allowed the attacker to get in to the accounts, and locked the legitimate user out.

Quite frankly, there's nothing that you can do to prevent this.  But this was the part of the article that should never happen to anyone:

Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

Backups address rather a lot of security problems, and everyone should be doing them.  You should really back up to multiple different locations, so if you lose your account or machine, and you lose a backup, you're still covered.

I like this sort of thing for quick backups, and there's a deal going on right now*:

32 GB flash drive - you can back up a lot of data onto that.  $20.  FOr that price, you can get a couple, and not worry about losing your kid's pictures.  Or you could get this to back up all the computers in your house:

2TB external hard disk.  $129.  For not much more you can get one that attached to your network, and you don't have to schlep the drive from computer to computer (if all you computers are near each other, you could do this with a USB hub).

Also, remember that your smart phone can also be a backup for music and pictures.  Even if your house burns down and you lose all your backups, you might have all your pix on your phone.  More backups is better, because two is one and one is none.

Just a word to the wise.

* I don't have any relationship with TigerDirect, just bought a bunch of stuff from them in the past.

Just when you thought that the Democrats couldn't get any creepier

Want to know which of your neighbors are Democrats?  There's an app for that:

Curious how many Democrats live on your block? Just download the Obama campaign's new mobile app.

The app, released last week, includes a Google map for canvassers that recognizes your current location and marks nearby Democratic households with small blue flags.

For each targeted address, the app displays the first name, age and gender of the voter or voters who live there: "Lori C., 58 F, Democrat."

This simply makes my skin crawl.  We know that there are people who are willing to target their political opponents.  Not with words, but with violence:

In the ten days following the November 4 election [California's Proposition 8], seven houses of worship in Utah and ten buildings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in the Sacramento area were targets of vandalism, such as graffiti and meeting house glass doors shattered. According to the LDS spokesperson for the Sacremento area, the vandalism that they experienced in the ten days after the election was more than they usually get in an entire year.^{[5][30][31][32]} A copy of the Book of Mormon, an LDS religious text, was found burning at the front of a meetinghouse.^[30][32] The FBI investigated these events to determine whether a violation of civil rights had occurred.^[31]

An affiliate group of the radical trans/queer organization Bash Back! claims credit for pouring glue into the locks of an LDS meetinghouse and spray painting its walls. A Web posting signed by Bash Back!’s Olympia chapter said, “The Mormon church (just like most churches) is a cesspool of filth. It is a breeding ground for oppression of all sorts and needs to be confronted, attacked, subverted and destroyed.”^[33]

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, Citizen.

UPDATE 6 August 2012 20:02: Having slept on this (I queue posts the night before), this seems even more appalling than it did.  It utterly fails Joe Huffman's Jews In The Attic test, and if this sort of thing had been done my Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, liberals' heads would have exploded like the Martians from Mars Attacks:

Actually, this is where a LOT of security bugs come from

"Buffer Overflow"?  What's that?  Abstruse Goose brings it.