When you sign up for a service, you give away your personal data such as name, email address, and perhaps more like your phone number or address. This kind of digital information shared online is highly interesting to cybercriminals for various reasons: an email address can be used to initiate a phishing attack to extract sensitive data, a saved credit card number to empty your bank account, and so on. In other words, every time you hear about a data breach, it means bad news for all the users of that hacked service, because customer data has become extremely valuable in the digital era.
Data breaches occurred frequently in 2018, enough to be part of the weekly news cycle. The number of victims is measured in billions and you may even be one of them. For example, a massive Facebook loophole allowed third-party services to access user data. Does this sound familiar? Yes, this was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which kick-started the year and gave weight to data breaches. Read More…