System Engineer IBM | Posted on | Science-Technology
Do we really need to worry about the “Biggest Ever Data Breach”?
Software engineer at HCL technologies | Posted on
It depends on how much tech savvy you are.
Everyone, by now, must already have heard about what various news articles are calling the “monster breach”. And many of us are indeed panicking on account of it. First of all, let’s recall what exactly happened.
The news was revealed by the famous “Have I Been Pwned?” (HIBP), owned by Microsoft’s regional director, Troy Hunt. According to it, the “monster data dump” which is called “Collection #1” by Hunt, has got 772 million unique email addresses.
(Courtesy: The Indian Express)But things are not that bad actually.
A breach, similar to this (but not as big as this) happened in 2016. Hackers traded around 427 million MySpace passwords and 117 million LinkedIn passwords at that time.
Some reports tell that it is not the biggest data dump, as it’s a meta-breach collection, rather than the collection of any single security shortfall. Only 140 million out of these 772 million email addresses, along with 10 million passwords were not included HIBP’s research.
Also read: What are the most commonly used passwords?
So according to Hunt, himself, almost half of the passwords were already breached.
Hunt also gives us a solution through a post:
“My hope is that for many, this will be the prompt they need to make an important change to their online security posture.” (Motherboard)
So going back to where I started from, you would not panic if you are tech-savvy.
All you need to do is re-use the same passwords again and again, and be a bit more thoughtful while creating our unique passwords. Also, using enable the two-factor authentication is highly recommended.
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Digital Marketing Executive | Posted on
Studies have shown that the average probability that an organization will experience a data breach has increased to 27.7 percent compared with last year's percent. This indicates that we should follow the best cybersecurity practices to secure our data.
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