Personal data is any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual. Different pieces of information, which collected together can lead to the identification of a particular person, also constitute personal data.
Personal data that has been de-identified, encrypted or pseudonymised but can be used to re-identify a person remains personal data and falls within the scope of the GDPR.
Personal data that has been rendered anonymous in such a way that the individual is not or no longer identifiable is no longer considered personal data. For data to be truly anonymised, the anonymisation must be irreversible.
A data breach may include incidents such as theft or loss of digital media such as computer tapes, hard drives, or laptop computers containing such media upon which such information is stored unencrypted, posting such information on the world wide web or on a computer otherwise accessible from the Internet without proper information security precautions, transfer of such information to a system which is not completely open but is not appropriately or formally accredited for security at the approved level, such as unencrypted e-mail, or transfer of such information to the information systems of a possibly hostile agency, such as a competing corporation or a foreign nation, where it may be exposed to more intensive decryption techniques.
Imagine your internet passwords as a door and your online account as house. If someone gets access to your doorkeys, they can freely enter and leave your house, moreover he/she can toy with your furniture, even sell it in the market. One of the effective way to stop him/her would be to change your doorlock. This would prevent them from accessing your house, same with your internet passwords. If you regularly chnage your passwords, this would stop anyone with a key to access your data and misuse it.
Organizations that have experienced a data breach sometimes assume that intrusion events are discrete, one-time incidents, as opposed to active and ongoing policy violations, employee error, or criminal conduct. The consequences of mistaken assumptions can be devastating. Kroll’s forensic and technical investigation experts can help you eliminate the uncertainty by determining whether a data breach may be ongoing and then identifying the appropriate steps you should take to “stop the bleeding
There was a time that such matters were of little public interest, but the scale of recent breaches and tragic consequences of a few of them has made it headline news. There is what is termed ‘reputational collateral’. Target’s 2013 breach, for example, cost them an estimated 40 percent drop in profit in the 4th quarter of that year. Yahoo’s loss of personal data of its three billion users dropped its value over 1 billion dollars. However, the worst financial impact for a company that suffers a breach is likely to be the expense, distraction and time of the subsequent legal and audit work, the impact on the staff within the organization and, increasingly, the lawsuits. I wouldn’t want to include the cost of the work to fix the organization’s IT, since this would probably have been below standard anyway unless the breach came like a bolt from the blue.
There are typically five types of data that malicious actors will want to steal:
With the same anology, assuming doorkey to be your password and your online accounts to be your different houses. If they have access to one house, naturally by hit & trial method, if you are using the same doorkeys everywhere. They have access to all the houses. The only effective way to stop them is by changing all the doorkeys to a new one. This would completely block their access to your houses and you will be virtually safe.
Once a hacker has your data, there are a few things they can do. The first step is to scan your data for important and/or valuable information like bank details, login information, photos, emails, or messages. The perpetrator will then decide whether they are going to keep the files or sell them to a third party (often called a “broker”).
Typically, hackers will sell your data. This reduces risk for them, and also gives them an immediate profit. The price for stolen personal information depends on how valuable it is. For example, personal data from a government official or a celebrity is far more valuable than that belonging to the average person.
As mentioned earlier, credit card and payment details are the most popular on the dark web, and clearing funds from your account is dead easy. Usually a “broker” will buy your card details on a marketplace and resell them to a “carder”. The carder will then get as much money out of your accounts as possible before you or your bank notices.
They can generally replicate a card by printing one themselves, but more commonly they will use them for a gift card shell game. What happens is the carder will use your payment details to buy online gift cards, and then make purchases with the gift cards. Typically, they will purchase electronics because they are always in demand and can be easily resold, making them relatively low risk.
The risk of losing your funds is very small with a credit card compared to the risk involved with debit cards. Banks usually have policies in place for credit card fraud and are quite good about spotting suspicious purchases. Debit cards are unfortunately a different story; not much can be done if your funds are stolen. Debit cards are far more common in Europe than in North America, and they are extremely valuable on the dark web.
Personal information is far less valuable on the black market, since it is already widely available. Your name, birthday, address, and email can sometimes just be gathered by looking at your social media accounts. As a result, there has been a huge growth in extortion regarding personal data.
Malicious actors will obtain your personal information and threaten to release it to the public. This is very common with explicit photos and messages, as hackers will hold them for a ransom. If you don’t pay up, your reputation could sadly be ruined. Naturally, this data is even more valuable if the victim is a public figure, such as when the National Enquirer allegedly threatened to release photos of Jeff Bezos and his mistress.
Companies, in particular financial organizations, have tried to fight identity and financial crime by implementing Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures. This requires companies to verify the identity of their users by using personal documents such as passports or other forms of government-issued ID. However, this has led to an increase in theft of personal documents, tax information, and insurance numbers.
KYC information contains everything a malicious actor needs to commit fraud and steal your identity. By having your passport or driver’s license, they can apply for loans, and claim your tax credits and your insurance claims. While this type of hack is very difficult to orchestrate, it is one of the most valuable, making it more and more appealing to criminals.
Data breaches (also known as data leaks or data spills) can be caused by hostility, malice, mischief, carelessness, inattention or sheer accident. It can range from political ‘activism’ to taking old workstations to a public dump with their hard drives still in place. As well as being due to organized crime, competing organizations, or attacks by hostile foreign regimes, they are often due to staff within an organization being bribed, careless or naive. A considerable number are the work of bored youngsters. Whenever sensitive, protected or confidential data gets into the control of an unauthorized person, then there has been a data breach. The consensus definition is that a data breach is ‘a compromise of security that leads to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure of, or access to protected data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed.’ (ISO/IEC 27040). This definition is no longer adequate: A breach can result from an apparently trivial incident such as accidentally exposing a directory that contains sensitive or confidential information to general access over the internet. If it cannot be proved that it was never accessed, it should be recorded as a data breach. A recent famous example of this was when the AA car insurance and breakdown company in the UK left 13GB of customer information unsecured online last year. It was available to anyone online for a few days in April due to a server ‘misconfiguration’. The definition of a breach also needs to be widened because of the way that it is possible to extract a surprising amount of personal information by inference attack through joining apparently-innocuous sets of data. A pseudonymized set of records that is published can be a data breach if it can subsequently identify real data about real individuals when combined with another dataset. If an organisation infringes published security guidelines, the onus is on the organization to demonstrate that there was no breach. For example, the use of live data for developing or testing databases can, in some cases, be considered a data breach if all necessary precautions haven’t been taken, such as performing security checks on contract staff, or implementing access control for developers. Again, the problem, if your auditors become aware of this, is in proving that no actual data breach resulted from unnecessarily exposing the data. Sometimes, a breach is only confirmed retrospectively by accident, as when a security firm subsequently stumbles across the data on the Dark Web, as when a contractor to the Republican National Committee left a terabyte of data on an unsecured cloud server that included names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, voter registration details and ‘modelled’ ethnicities and religions.
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