The Perils of the Internet

Last week, certain areas of the Internet found out about Zanarkand and, upon seeing the cipher at the bottom of the page, decided we were part of a government conspiracy. While this is obviously untrue, and we’ve explained the cipher and (sadly) decided not to honor the discount contained within it going forward, the situation did serve to highlight one of the issues with the Internet: easily-accessible personally identifiable information (or PII).

Once they found our site, it was very easy to discover who our President is, as his name is on our business application, our FCC license, and the public data about the website. From his name, they were then able to find his LinkedIn and Facebook pages. And from there, they started constructing a profile.

If this were an intrusion attempt, rather than a portion of the social Internet chasing ghosts, they could have leveraged this information...