What Is A Data Breach?
Data breaches happen all the time, but what exactly are they? When someone exposes confidential and protected personal information to outside sources, this is called a data breach. Data breaches can happen due to a cybercriminal hacking a database or because the company’s database was not secured, or someone from the company accidentally left something open to vulnerability.
When a data breach happens, it can include someone stealing your bank account information, credit card numbers, social security number, email addresses, passwords, and other personally identifiable information. Criminals profit from this information when they steal it, regardless of the way the information was leaked. Anyone can experience a data breach, from hospitals, retailers, and the government, to colleges and business corporations.
Who Has Had A Data Breach?
One of the worst years for data breaches was 2016. Yahoo had disclosed in 2016 that 1 billion+ user accounts were stolen in August of 2013 and 500 million user accounts were stolen in late 2014. 2016 was ranked by the Identity Theft Resource Center as a record year of data breaches. These include:
- Banking/Credit/Financial: 52 breaches
- Business: 494 breaches
- Education: 98 breaches
- Government/Military: 72 breaches
- Healthcare/Medical: 377 breaches
Now that 2019 is almost done, the first half of the year has been trying to beat 2016’s record. This year has been the year for data breaches, in only the first six months of 2019, over 4.1 billion records were exposed. That is a lot, and in only half a year? This year is not looking good for businesses and companies either.
How Do Data Breaches Happen?
There are many different reasons a data breach can happen, anywhere from crimeware to payment card skimmers. All the reasons involve a criminal getting information in one way or another. These can include:
Company Insider
A company insider is one that understands how valuable their consumer’s information is, and they have ways of leaking it to someone that wants to buy it. These types of data breaches account for 60% of them.
Crimeware
This involved malware, which is malicious software that steals information from unsuspecting parties.
Cyber-espionage
Malicious emails shown as being linked to real people and companies, when they really are not.
Denial of Service
This targets large organizations’ networks and systems.
Payment Card Skimmers
Skimming devices placed on a credit card reader by criminals that steal payment information, such as ATMs or gas pump machines.
Point of Sale
Targeting point of sale terminals from businesses that sell something.
Physical Theft or Loss
If someone loses their laptop or cell phone; hackers can pick them up and steal important information from them.
Web Apps
When you sign up for a new app online, you tend to share some personal data, which hackers steal from these applications and share or sell them elsewhere.
These are just a few of the ways personal information gets stolen online or in person. Hackers can and will always find ways to get the information they want in order to sell it or use it to steal from you. Data breaches happen all the time, so how can you fight against them happening to you?
How Can I Protect Myself?
There are a few ways you can protect your personal information. This includes using secure websites, shredding documents instead of throwing them away, using strong and secure passwords, never using the same password on different accounts, monitoring your financial information for errors, checking your credit reports regularly, and getting your personal data that is not needed online off the internet.
All of these are pretty easy to start doing, but how do you get your personal information from showing up in Google? This is actually pretty simple; just use wiperts.com. Their website is dedicated to consumers like you that are looking for a way to get their personal data removed from the world wide web.
They find the information you want to have removed, and they go about removing it. But that is not all, next they monitor all the information you want to have removed and they remove it whenever it pops up again. There is no way to completely remove yourself from the internet, other than never using it in the first place. Which tends to be impossible these days. However, with Wiperts, you can get your data removed and keep having it removed when it shows up again. This is a great way to protect yourself and keep your peace of mind.
Conclusion
Data breaches are imminent, regardless of the company and their level of security. However, you can use Wiperts.com today to get some of your data removed from online, and keep it monitored for future removal.
