Data Breaches and the panic they cause!

As soon as you hear of a data breach, most people get concerned; and rightly so.

Whether it’s the bank you use, a social networking site you have an account for, or a telecoms provider, it’s always a cause for concern to hear that information has been hacked or leaked from an organisation that you are associated with in some way.

But with huge breaches like the recent MySpace, Tumblr, and LinkedIn ones comes an element of panic that causes things to get lost in translation, and the result is other organisations getting wrongly dragged in to breaches.

When a breach occurs, the new trend is to check if your email address has been hacked by using the website “Have I Been Pwned” which can handily tell you in seconds if your account is associated with a popular hack. Not only that but it can usually tell you specifically which one as well.

I’ve used it – it certainly seems to be useful.

But with news of a hack comes widespread panic and paranoia – which is understandable – as we saw recently when Dropbox was incorrectly named as a source of some 70 million account details being hacked. In reality this was actually associated with the Tumblr hack, but Dropbox got inadvertently named which resulted in some hysteria for users.

Security firms LifeLock and MyIdCare.com actually notified its users that Dropbox had been compromised, so the news of the alleged breach all looked official, but Dropbox have reportedly not suffered a hack or a breach.

So, for now, Dropbox users can be safe that their information hasn’t actually been leaked. But then again, you never know – some of the recent hacks have stemmed from leaks that actually occurred years ago, and your information might already be on a list, ready to be sold on the “dark web” for a small fortune!

Greenwich University suffers second data breach in so-called “revenge hack”

Is the Myspace hack the biggest hack out there, and should you be concerned?