[HoodPin]

It is indeed scary stuff. But at the same time, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that our country is performing similar tests/tasks.

FWIW, I believe that really sensitive military electronic traffic is confined to a separately hardwired network, that's not connected to the public internet.

But personal info and traffic is certainly up for grabs. I think from a personal standpoint, the best thing you can do is sign up for credit monitoring, and check it regularly. Also, don't get pissed when a CC company denies a charge because they're not certain of its validity. Yeah, its a PITA, but I'm sorta glad they're watching out when they do. We've gotten into the habit of alerting our CC when we're going on travel.

I thought I read before that the next gen of the internet was supposed to be better able to deal with these improprieties. Supposedly, the nodes would be taking care of all the virus scanning, security protocols, etc., making the end-user connections less vulnerable.