Data Privacy Week is currently running – from January 24th-28th. The event, also known as Data Protection Week in Europe, is designed to nudge people into thinking about and taking their data privacy more seriously.
It is apparent with many consumers that although they live in an increasingly digital world, too many give little thought to data privacy until after our personal data has been compromised.
From phishing attacks to wide-spread data breaches, key threats exist that put our important information at risk, according to Hank Schless, Senior Manager of Security Solutions at Lookout. Schless has provided Digital Journal with some findings from a recent survey which connects data breaches and online criminal activity with data privacy weaknesses and concerns.
In the recent study, conducted by Lookout, data was gathered to detect how hackers build up profiles for their targets. This connects with the data privacy issues.
One area picked up on was the extent of data shared on social media. Sharing personal information enables criminals to build-up profiles of people for nefarious purposes. In terms of data being shared, the report found that 60 percent of people share their birthday online, with this snippet of personal data being accessible to strangers.
In other cases, 46 percent of people freely share their friend list publicly and 49 percent elect to share tagged photos publicly.
Spotlighting on the U.S., the data also reveals that U.S. citizens appear quite willing to share video streaming accounts (almost 58 percent) and share passwords to various online accounts (at 55 percent).
In addition to this, 51 percent of online users share their credit and debit card information and 54 percent are willing to share their phone passcodes. Furthermore, 50 percent will share their email password.
What can be taken from this? Our increased reliance on digital technologies to manage every facet of life provides the need to rethink what we share about our lives and how to protect our most vulnerable information.
Since most hackers will be focused on growing their personal wealth, they will often resort to blackmailing their victims through ransomware or using various phishing techniques to trick them into making a bogus financial transfer. This also makes financial institutions and the consumers who do business with them a primary target.
