Was this always happening in this big scope? Leaks of games, data that is stolen, all these breaches in big companies. Feels like I see this everyday
The GDPR enforces that data breaches are made public, so you may have seen a rise in publicly known breaches, starting in 2018.
Many companies in the US have been reporting their breaches since the early 2010’s. All 50 states have some sort of breach notification law on the books.
I have no hard data, but from being in the industry + reading the news, my impression has been that the number of known data breaches went up significantly, even for US companies. Is the punishment maybe just completely laughable in those US laws?
That was the case here in Germany. The GDPR is heavily inspired by our data protection law (BDSG), that we had in place since the 90s. With a significant amendment, which is that punishment went up from at most 300,000€ to 20 billion € (and even more for big companies).
For many companies, this was when they realized, they actually have to adhere to data protection laws. Suddenly, we had non-IT companies reporting data breaches, which was essentially not a thing beforehand.
Yes—it’s why you should use a password manager to generate a unique password for each and every site you sign up for, and think long and hard before trusting any site (or any org for that matter) with your personal information.
Haveibeenpwned.com is a website for checking which sites have leaked your data.
Make sure it’s an offline password manager. It’s a really bad idea to allow your password database to be stored on someone else’s server.
In my experience, it’s always been this bad. However, as the world becomes more connected, it becomes easier to find systems to break into and easier to find ways to break in. It’s only recently that most countries have enacted legislation to enforce mandatory reporting of data breaches, and so we hear more about them.
Cyber security has always been (and probably always will be) an arms race between those who want to secure data and those who want to steal it. As the value and usefulness of data goes up, so does the desire of the bad guys to steal it. Identity theft and just plain ransoming of data are only ever going to increase.
Use:
- a password manager
- a different random password or pass phrase for every site
- a different random email address for each site (Apple’s “Hide my Email”; Firefox Relay; DuckDuckGo mail; 33mail, for example)
- different false details as much as possible for every site
Don’t:
- Use the same details (name, password, email address) on every site
- use your real details if you can possibly avoid it. If you must, misspell your details (“Johhn Smith”, “1 Maiin Street”) so that you can track the misuse of your data.
We’ve gotten better at reporting them
Cyber security guy here.
Consider a large organization with a lot to lose. They usually invest proactively in a Cyber security program.
Now consider all these companies with data breaches. They were tiny startups with nothing to lose. No reason to consider an investment in cyber security best practices. Their modus operandi was quickly pushing the product to market so that the $ could start coming in.
I’ve been exposed so many times throughout the years, the mails were automatically moved to the spam folder.
I’d say that some time ago there weren’t that many leaks because not so much data was stored. But sites were modified to show spam and such.
It’s the new normal.
any system or network is only as strong as its weakest component - in many cases, people are the weakest component.
security is hard and complex. companies don’t hire security people.
