As the world and technology is developing day by day, it is becoming easier to conduct cyber-crimes or bringing up scams. Everyone with a secure internet connection and stable account in Google and other social media are vulnerable to attacks. Privacy protection these days are becoming tough to establish.
Privacy is generally defined as the ability to protect someone’s information from others and hence making them to be selective in nature. Every information we have cannot be shared to all and some can only be disclosed to the chosen ones. This is nothing but protecting something special or sensitive.
Every individual has their right to protect their privacy. Even if different countries have different law, the privacy rights remain the same. Without the consent of the owner, no one has the right to access the private information of someone even if it is an individual, corporation or government.
Privacy breach happens when someone invades the personal data without the permission of the owner. This can be done forcefully or unknowingly. In both these cases these ought to be a cyber-crime.
Whereas, privacy threat happens when the attacker finds a way to connect the record of the owner in a published data base. Privacy threats are generally classified as attribute linkage, record linkage and table linkage.
Privacy breach is often carried out by infecting an entire network and finding a way into the target’s device. A weak unstable network often favors a privacy breach.
The main data that are targeted by the hackers include Personal Identifying Information such as name, date of birth, address, credit card details, social security numbers etc. These information’s are more than enough to exploit a person and can even lead to financial destruction.
Recognizing the risk
Privacy rights of every country allow the freedom to protect one’s personal information.
Personal information of a person will not be stored in a single place. They would be disintegrated across different platforms like financial institutions, government organizations, health care agencies, social media platforms etc. So one must take good care about his data distributed in different areas of the society. Information is always valuable and we should safeguard them.
The valuable artifacts are often exploited by the cyber criminals. When the cyber groups are more sophisticated and has good technical knowledge, they often target established organizations rather than individuals because organization will consists of thousands of personal data and in a sense this is a much profitable way. The threat actors then use these data for their personal gain or sell it in dark web.
Some of the top-tier cybercrimes in the present world
Vulnerability in web application
In majority of the cyber cases, there exists a vulnerability which will be utilized by the hacker to perform the attack. The size and complexity of the vulnerability is never an issue. If there is vulnerability even if it is a minute one, the software will be prone to cyber-attacks. For example, in an agency Equifax, there remained an unpatched vulnerability. This situation was left unchecked for months. This loophole was utilized by a hacker and stole around 143 million people’s personal data.
Lacking breach response
Today’s threat actors are technically so sophisticated that they will break any security protocol to perform the attack. The only way to prevent them from doing more damage is by creating a breach response team. The team should be trained in such a way that the actions and decisions should be quick and can successfully prevent the attack. According to a study about the cost of data breach, the faster the data breach is discovered, the lesser will be the cost spent. In every organization, there must be an incident-response team.
Insiders and poorly trained employees
The threat or attack does not always come from outside. It can be from inside. This is known as insider threat. We can categorize insider threat in two ways. One, they can be a planned or intentional attack or it can happen due to the carelessness of an employee. In both these cases, the destruction scale is huge.
Inadequate personal data disposal
Personal data, as said earlier is an important aspect that should be secured. Exchange of personal data should be done only between trusted sources. If it is for a business purpose, the data should be disposed securely after the use. In many organizations they fail to remove the used personal data after use. As per law, this comes under the category of GDPR compliance which may lead to hefty fines.
Lack of transparency in privacy policy, terms and conditions
According to GDPR rules a proper permission of the owner should be taken before collecting and sharing his personal data. For every organization, there must be a visible privacy policy according to which the business should move forward. The owner should be given a proper description of why is his data being collected, how is it going to be utilized, processed, stored, shared and disposed of.
Personal data sharing
Data sharing with third parties can sometimes be dangerous and may lead to vicious happenings. Before sharing, the organization should ensure the credibility of the party and should have a legal consent of the owner before sharing.
Data transfer over insecure channels
Never transmit personal information through insecure protocols like FTTP & HTTP. These domains can be easily hacked by the threat actors. Try to introduce safe protocols like SFTP & TLS that ensures a secure method to transfer data.
Privacy fix
- Regularly monitor your financial accounts
- Always keep a strong password
- Check credit card status and reports
- Secure your smartphone
- Ensure web security
- Use an authenticate anti-virus software.