Do you have an account on USPS.com?  If so, you're not alone.  Tens of millions of Americans use it daily for a variety of purposes.  Unfortunately, if you do have an account, it may have been compromised.

Recently, the USPS announced the discovery of a critical security vulnerability that exposed the account information of more than sixty million customers to literally anyone with a USPS.com account.

In recent years we've seen several companies suffer from hacks of various magnitudes. Over time, we've witnessed the growth of what could be described as best practices in terms of how to respond.

The typical arc goes something like this:

The hack is discovered.

Google relies on crowd sourcing to help keep its maps up to date.  There's no other approach that even comes close to being feasible.  Sure, Google has employees on the job, roving the nation's highways, byways, and back streets. Even if the company employed ten times the number they're currently using, their maps wouldn't be nearly as accurate as they've become via crowd sourcing.

Back in October, Microsoft issued an update for Windows 10 that was a bit of a disaster.  It wound up deleting some user files and sparked a completely justified outrage.  The company pulled the update back, taking it offline so more people wouldn't be impacted.

There's trouble brewing at Amazon, although details are sketchy about how much trouble there might be.

Recently, the company sent the following message to some of its customers:

"Hello, We're contacting you to let you know that our website inadvertently disclosed your email address due to a technical error.

In recent months, Google has taken steps to tighten up its processes so that fewer poisoned apps find their way into the Google Play Store.  In addition to that, the company has stepped up its efforts to ruthlessly track down and remove malicious apps whenever and wherever they are found.

The mobile payment platform Venmo (owned by Paypal) has a fraud problem.  That's not exactly new.  The company has struggled with fraud issues for a long time, but recently, things have gotten out of control.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the company reported losses of $40 million in just the first three months of 2018, and there's no end to the red ink in sight.

Bad news for computer users everywhere.  Researchers at the University of California in Riverside have discovered that GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are vulnerable to side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, which have been plaguing Intel CPU's for the better part of a year.

In the world of data security, cryptocurrency mining software is often overlooked or discounted as a threat because it doesn't do serious harm to the infected system.

It bleeds off computing resources, putting them to work for the miners who control the software, working for them to solve complex cryptographic puzzles which generate revenue for the hackers.

Remember earlier this year when net neutrality got killed off and everybody said it wouldn't matter? Well, it seems it might have mattered after all.

Recently, three US Senators sent letters of inquiry to four wireless carriers. They are investigating allegations that the carriers have been throttling (slowing down) video services or Skype video calls.