How To Stay Safe In Case Of Online Data Breaches
Introduction
Data breaches are a serious concern, and even tech giants like Facebook are not immune, as we witnessed in 2019. But, data breaches and data leaks can happen to anyone. Which is why it is important to take matters into your own hands and implement data breach protection measurements.
This article will tell you more about data breaches and give you some tips on how to stay protected. Also what to do if you think your information was compromised during a data breach.
What Is A Data Breach?
Data breaches happen when a large amount of information gets stolen from a system without administrators noticing. Typically in companies that deal with large quantities of valuable personal information, such as credit cards. But, any type of information can be a target to hackers.
When a data breach happens, there are two levels of victims – people whose data is jeopardized and the company where the breach occurred, which now has ruined reputation.
After a data breach happens, the hackers who obtained the information usually look to sell it online, which is actually how we find out that a breach did happen – without that, some data breaches would go completely unnoticed.
What Do I Do If I Have Had A Data Breach?
If your information was jeopardized during a data leak, there are some things you can do to protect yourself.
The first thing is to determine what information was compromised and to act accordingly. For highly sensitive details, contact the institutions that issued the documents and let them know.
Also, make sure to change any passwords related to the email that was a part of the data breach. A password manager will help you create strong passwords and will also help you manage all of your passwords in one place, so you never lose them. TotalAV Password Vault will help you do just that, making sure your passwords are hard to breach.
It’s also imperative to use only the latest versions of all the programs installed on your systems and enable Windows update and download it regularly. This will get the latest security patches, too, making sure no further breaches happen.
If your company or organization suffered a data breach, things get complicated, and you need to notify authorities to protect all of the people whose data leaked. But, having a powerful antivirus solution is the right first step to make sure hackers don’t get a hold of your valuable information.
Conclusion
Data breaches are a serious security threat to systems worldwide. The main issue is that sometimes we can’t prevent the breach, as it often happens to major companies such as Yahoo. Regular data breach checks are so important so you can act quickly.
Making sure the breach doesn’t happen on your servers is important too. It all starts with good Internet hygiene and solid antivirus protection TotalAV provides. Better to be safe than sorry!