Data breaches make the headlines on a near-daily basis, and it can be tough to keep track of all the ways your data is vulnerable. But while massive hacks involving millions of people get all the attention, there are smaller moments that sum up your data security. Here are four such moments.
Moments That Sum Up Your Data Security
Your data is vulnerable if you:
Store your passwords in several unsecured locations
The biggest data breach in history happened when hackers accessed the database of the website LinkedIn. In 2012, this database contained more than 167 million passwords, all of which were stored in plain text.
Plain text means that the passwords were not encrypted — they were not enciphered to hide their meaning from anyone who might come along and see them. This is a sign that you don’t take your data security seriously because it requires very little effort to change your passwords from plain text to encrypted.
You can do this yourself, or use an app like Dashlane to do it for you. That way, even if a hacker can access your password database, they won’t be able to look at it.
Your company doesn’t have a security strategy.
You can tell whether your company takes its data security seriously by looking at its current state of affairs. The U.S. government fails miserably by this measure: It has no overall strategy for securing sensitive information.
Instead, each department and agency is responsible for developing its security strategy — which means that there is no cohesive plan for protecting information from the top down.
With no comprehensive strategy, the government is at constant risk of losing control over its data — and it does. It loses control over information that’s publicly available, but it also loses control over information that’s shared with other agencies.
Want an example? The Social Security Administration recently discovered that one of its contractors had been exposing protected personal information for as long as two years.
You don’t know what apps are accessing your data.
Another example of how our data is vulnerable daily can be seen in the way we use our mobile devices. Mobile apps are becoming increasingly popular gateways into our digital lives — think Facebook or Instagram on your phone — but they also threaten our privacy and security because we often don’t know what they’re doing with our data.
Apps can access sensitive information about you, like your location or contacts, which can be done without informing you. This makes it easy for malicious apps to collect information about you and use it for their purposes.
You can’t delete or control these apps, and there’s no way to know how they’re collecting your information.
A company doesn’t patch its security systems.
The scale of the Equifax data breach was so massive that it feels as though it happened overnight. But in truth, Equifax was hacked for more than a month before the breach was discovered — and even then, the hackers were able to access the data for a whole additional month.
Why did Equifax fail to notice the breach?
The company has been criticized for not patching its systems, leaving them vulnerable to attack. But how can you tell if you’re at risk of missing a patch?
There are several free websites that will scan your system for potential vulnerabilities, like quickfix.io.