On Wednesday, I got an email from my blog’s service provider. The email was entitled, “Security Incident”, and started off with the following description of what had occurred. It went on to say that they didn’t think that very much information was compromised, but they couldn’t really be certain. Protect your passwords, they warned, and stay tuned for any further details. Of course, this is in addition to the various credit card hack notices that we have all received.

Tough note to communicate today: Automattic, [The Company behind WordPress] had a low-level (root) break-in to several of our servers, and potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed.

We’ve been hacked, once, as many of you might remember. It was the day that we joined Facebook. I had uploaded our list of email addresses, so that Facebook could use it to send out friend requests. The virus or whatever it was started emailing out solicitations for Canadian Viagra, to all our friends. Worst still, it did so under our name. We eventually got it under control, but not before some damage was done. We got responses from some of our friends, asking us if they were infected now. I didn’t think so, but how should I know.

This week, I had to fill out an online form that asked a lot of personal questions. Instead of the usual password, this system had you construct a series of personal questions and then supply the answers to these questions. It seemed a little strange, but then it got even stranger. Part of the form asked me to supply a physical description. Just the basics, like what appears on your driver’s license, height, weight, hair color and eye color. I didn’t have any problem with the height. I didn’t even bother to lie about my weight. Eye color was no big deal either, but then there was hair color.

I’ve always answered black to this question, but on this online form, I noticed that in addition to black and the usual hair colors, “gray or graying” also appeared. This entry gave me pause for thought and in that pause, I noticed that the list included even more colors, including, green, blue, pink and purple. Those colorful distractions aside, I really wrestled with which hair color to enter, black or gray. I eventually went with black, for the following reason. If sometime down the road, I was ever called on this entry, I could always claim that it was black when I filled out the form, but that was a while ago.

All of this writing about internet security got me worried and then it got me thinking, and I did a little online research. Everyday, more of our personal data is entrusted to different websites that can’t seem to control of it. Parsing through all too many security firms, all intent on selling me their services, Eventually, I hit upon this blog-site that had what I thought was a rather insightful list of do’s and don’ts, click here. You can never be too careful.