Well Wishers Urge Barbara Bush Recovery; North Dakota Railway Reopens After Crash; Kerry Arrives In Mideast For Peace Talks; Group Says Snapchat Hack Was Meant To "Raise Public Awareness" Of Security Risk
WHITFIELD: All right, checking your top stories, well wishers are pouring in to a Houston hospital where former first lady, Barbara Bush, is now entering her third full day. The 88-year-old is being treated for the record a respiratory problem and according to family and friends, flashing her trademark feistiness and good humor.</s>CHASE UNTERMEYER, FORMER BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL/FAMILY FRIEND: Well, Barbara Bush is a tough old gal who will outlive us all, but our love is with her because she's not just the former first lady of America. She's the first lady of our hearts. So we know that she'll pull through and it will be a happy New Year for everybody.</s>WHITFIELD: President Obama has wished her a speedy recovery. And former President Bill Clinton fired off this tweet, referring to Mrs. Bush and her love of Texas college football, saying this quote, "I'll be rooting for Barbara Bush's full recovery while she's rooting for Baylor today, all my best to her and George H.W. Bush. A rail line in North Dakota is open again after a fiery crash. Meantime, federal investigators say they found broken axel parts at the site. They also say one of the trains involved in the crash derailed at a switch in the tracks, but they found nothing unusual about the tracks or any signals. According to the NTSB, all tank cars have been removed from the rails and crews are now working to rebuild the track. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hours ago landed in Tel Aviv for peace talks. He will meet with the Israel prime minister then head to Ramallah to meet with the Palestinian president. For now, the Israeli government reportedly has delayed an announcement about new settlement construction. The move avoids a potentially high-profile dispute during Kerry's visit. And Skype appears to be the latest victim of hackers tied to Syrian President Bashar al Assad. The Syrian Electronic Army took credit for busting open social media accounts run by the internet calling service. The group also posted contact information for the retiring CEO of Microsoft, which owns Skype, along with a message that accuses the software giant of selling user data to the government. Microsoft officials have not immediately commented. Yet another tech company is dealing with an embarrassing data breach. Snapchat, a popular smart phone messaging app that allows people to send photos and videos that quickly disappear. Hacking group has posted the names and phone numbers of more than 4 million of its users online. CNN's Laurie Segall is following the story for us from New York. This makes a whole lot of folks very nervous.</s>LAURIE SEGALL, CNNMONEY TECH CORRESPONDENT: If you're on Snapchat, have kids on Snapchat, you have to be taking a step back and saying I'm a little bit concerned, as you said, 4.6 million accounts exposed in this hack, so pretty significant number. Phone numbers revealed in this. User names revealed and also, Fredricka, this information was posted on the web and available for anybody to download. The hackers that posted it, they blurt out two digits of the phone number to say we're going to respect your privacy to a degree, but they also said that this would be subject to change. Have you to say if you're trying to do good things, why did you put this information on the web in the first place? Let me read you a statement on why they did it. They said, "Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. I spoke to the security researchers who initially found the vulnerability. They weren't the ones who put this online, but they found the vulnerability in it. It was there apparently for months and they never heard back from Snapchat. And when I said, OK, are we good now? Have you patched up this hole? What they told me last night was they may have patched it, but with a couple of minor modifications, you can actually utilize this exploit. Pretty eye opening -- Fredricka.</s>WHITFIELD: My gosh, indeed, it is. Let's bring in Kevin Mitnick, the president of mitnicksecurity.com and formerly the most wanted computer criminal by the FBI, but now he hacks for the good guys. Good to see you, Kevin. If Skype and Snapchat are vulnerable, is your private information safe anywhere?</s>KEVIN MITNICK, PRESIDENT, MITNICKSECURITY.COM: I think the NSA has proved what was said years ago. You have no privacy. Get over it. With respect to that Snapchat hack, it wasn't that the hackers actually broke into Snapchat. What they were able to do is to -- what you can do is you could abuse their service so if you have a valid telephone number of a Snapchat user, you could associate what user name or display name that that phone number is attached to. All these guys did was basically take up telephone numbers and you could download these telephone numbers at sites like TelcoData, us.net. They ran through this list incrementally to rebuild the database, to see that that phone number actually had a valid snap chat user associated with it. So it was a way they were able to abuse their service, because Snapchat did not limit how many requests somebody could do to their database. So, this was easy to do because they were just able to make these requests over and over and over again until they were able to get 4.6 billion users.</s>WHITFIELD: So, Kevin, how do we protect ourselves? Every time you sign up for something, a service, make a purchase, you have to put in your personal information, your address, phone number, maybe you have to create a password. What really can we do to protect ourselves since it seems like every site is vulnerable to hackers?</s>MITNICK: Well, first of all, with Snapchat you can always just elect not to put your phone number there. That eliminates that vulnerability. Across the board, you could do -- like if I sign up for -- if I order something online, I set up a special e-mail address just for orders so all the orders only go to this one particular e- mail address, I guess you could also set up a mail drop or type of service like mailboxes, et cetera, UPS store, so you only use that particular address that's not associated with your home address. But to tell you the truth, there are databases out there that anybody can subscribe to where you could look up anyone's Social Security number, date of birth, current address and a lot of personal information. And it costs about 25 to 50 cents a look up. So the bad guys want to get your information, there's really not anything out there stopping them.</s>WHITFIELD: All right, very sobering information for me. And I know for you, too, Laurie. And you're miss tech savvy over there. So Kevin Mitnick, Laurie Segall, hopefully, we all learned a little something and can better protect ourselves as we go online. Thank you so much.</s>MITNICK: Thank you.</s>WHITFIELD: All right, still to come, everyone thought he was dead, suicide, after being accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars from investors. How police finally nab this had former banker and where he was hiding all of this time.