Different Types Of Data Breaches Used By Cyberpunks
There are various types of data breaches that black hats use to get your sensitive information. They are as follows:
Medical Data
This data includes a person’s medical history, information, and general mental and physical health conditions. Also, it includes health insurance details and future body challenges a person will face based on his present conditions.
Personal Information
This part includes bank details, social security numbers, credit card numbers, financial statements, and tax forms. All of this information falls into the most sensitive details of an individual. If these are compromised, then one will lose all one’s savings and wealth.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is another important thing that covers highly important elements such as business details, client lists, patents, academic content, scientific research, classified documents, and artistic parchments. These are highly valuable and sensitive pieces of information upon which the whole framework of an individual or business firm depends.
What To Do After a Data Breach?
If you get any notifications about a data breach, suspicious activities regarding your account, or unauthorized access to important accounts or protected files, then you should come into action immediately. You should secure all the important profiles, change key passwords, and inform the relevant authorities about the suspicious activities and notifications you receive. Here are some important safety measures that you should take if you ever experience any security breach.
Confirm The Data Breach
First and foremost, you should confirm the data breach news. Many times, you also get fake news. So, in this scenario, you should contact the relevant company and ask them about the news. It is an obligation of the companies securing your accounts to inform you about security breaches. If they confirm the report, then you should take immediate action to secure your important accounts.
Secure Your Accounts
Once it is confirmed that there was a data breach and your credentials have been compromised, then you should consider changing the passwords and usernames to all the accounts. You should update your credit card PIN and bank login passcodes to avoid financial fraud. If you lose credentials to one account, then you risk losing credentials to other registrations as well. For example, if you lose your email password, you are likely to lose other important passcodes which are connected to the email account. Hence, resetting your important passwords would be highly helpful in saving you from potential trouble in the near future.
Use Multifactor Authentication Method
It would help if you used a multifactor authentication methodology to secure your accounts. It offers you multi-layered protection against unauthorized access to your logins. If, by chance, you lose the first credentials to your memberships, your accounts will still remain secure from illegal access. Multi Factor authentication covers email, OTP messages, and biometric access to different accounts. MFA offers enhanced safety to your important registrations and checks hackers from accessing them.
Monitor Financial Accounts & Credit Reports
You should monitor your financial identifications to keep an eye on all the activities related to them. For this, you should set transaction limits, alerts, and permissions to do any online activity. Make sure that you check your credit card reports to keep a good track of all the activities going on around it. Monitoring accounts will help you minimize your financial risks and online monetary scams.
Withdraw Your Information From Data Companies
As soon as you come to know that your details have been leaked, it would help if you considered removing your personal info from the data companies. These companies often collect user info and sell it to third parties. In the worst-case scenario, these companies sell your credentials on dark web platforms. Having your important details on the dark Web can be highly risky for you. You can never grasp the idea of how powerful an attack is on the way. Hence, it would help if you considered removing your information from the data brokers. To do so, you can take the help of online services that track user info on the web and help remove it from their databases.
Delete Old Accounts
Delete all the old or dormant accounts on your devices. These accounts increase the surface area of threats and potential security leaks. Getting rid of them will minimize the number of attack points that malicious actors can exploit against you. At the same time, the information attached to such accounts will be removed, which further reduces the risk of exposure. This will prevent credential reuse by cyberpunks to bypass user access controls. They will not be able to utilize these credentials to exploit any vulnerabilities. You can successfully simplify the overall process of data management and security enhancement.
