Few Tips For Protection Of Your Personal Big Data

Incidents of data breach raised a question that is data security a myth. Can we secure the data one hundred percent? It’s our responsibility to protect our personal data from intruders to be stolen or shared with anyone without consent. Everyone can try to protect the personal data on their own, but what happens when we share our data with Consent under any act with these organizations. How can we trust these organizations that will they protect our personal information? Data could be any kind of information, one of the most crucial type of data is Health related information, the information of the patients about their health (like infections, contagious disease, disabilities etc.).

A laptop was stolen from a car in Ottawa contained the health information about more than 35000 people- a report by Alex Brockman, Garrett Hinchey CBC News. It might be a local thief who had no idea about the information contained in the laptop or an upper level conspiracy to expose the data of innocent victims. If it is a conspiracy to steal the data, here are the consequences of the data breach.

It might have some immediate and/or future impacts. Data Invader might make fun of the disability of the patient or disclose some information which the victim would never want to share with anyone else. A post on social media or any kind of act may destroy or broke the person, which might become the reason of shame. The victims might commit an act of taking his/her own life because of information disclosure. They might be blackmailed and demanded for the money to keep the information in the closet.

For instance, a 15 year old girl from Ontario named Natalie Hall traded her old broken iPhone at a Tbooth Store to get a brand-new phone. Her phone was totally broken and got $11 credits towards her new phone. Because the phone wasn’t turning on she didn’t care about the data in her phone and she assumed that phone would be recycled. Instead of recycling the phone was refurbished and ended up in Dubai as a working phone thousands of miles away, young girl unaware of the data breach. She was contacted on social media by this person who purchased the refurbished phone, explaining her that the he purchased her old phone in Dubai. As a proof he sent her the snapshots of her private pictures in the gallery of her phone. Scared young girl shared this with her family and the police. She was asked to be friends and accept the friend request on social media. She ignored that and didn’t accept the request. This person actually got into her Social media accounts and accepted the friend request by himself because all of her accounts were logged on this device, she had to change all of the passwords. This is a lesson to all of us to delete the information from the device before selling it.

Compromised data could be on sale to insurance companies or any organization. The data brokers actually sell the data and it is a billion of dollars’ worth business. What if the insurance companies can predict your health in future and charge you the fees accordingly. You might have to pay a lot of money for your insurance coverage because they predict your health conditions based on the data they have which you cannot deny of hide anymore.

Facebook a famous social media platform who collects the data from billions of users by consent as they claim was accused to share the data with political parties to influence the campaign of President Trump. They also used to buy the data from data brokers as Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook Inc. confirmed in a conference. So, this is happening in actual and we need to figure out a way to how to stay protected from data intruders.

Some People would debate that the laptop should have been encrypted. Because it was a new laptop it wasn’t encrypted and all other laptops in the organization were encrypted as per investigation done later. As we know that the encrypted data can be decrypted very easily by the hackers. Here are the few we could implement to protect the data of the organizations.

• Cloud based data – data should be saved on the cloud which is easy to manage/ access. In case we have to move or delete the data in terms of the safety.it can be done easily.
• Biomatrices – the cloud data should be accessible only by biometrics like fingerprint reader, eye scanner, gesture based or heart beat etc.
• IP address-based access – The cloud-based data should be accessible through biometrics security at certain locations only. These locations can be identified by IP address or Mac address etc. IP address could be manipulated by software’s. So, IP address should be hidden and unique.
• Two factor authentications – there should be two factor authentications like one-time password or security question etc. to get access to the data
• Regular security updates – Organizations should keep updating their systems in order to protect the data and create a wall against the data invaders.
• Hire hackers – hackers should be hired to find the loop hole or possible breach in the system and make it more and more secure.