Keeping Your Data Safe

From Facebook to GDPR, 2018 has been an important year for data protection. We look at why data breaches are in the public eye, and what the region is doing to safeguard your private details.

- Neil King

When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before US senators in April to face questions about Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal – in which the personal information of up to 87 million users was harvested without their permission – the spotlight was shone more brightly than ever before on the issue of data security.

Fending off the sometimes probing, sometimes confused questions one by one, the billionaire CEO largely survived the grilling, but the mere fact he was there at all added fuel to a growing fire.

Data breaches are nothing new. Whether targeted by hackers, the result of poor security or lost computers, accidentally published, or part of an inside job, people’s data has always been at risk since the dawn of the technology age.

The stark reminders of this have been periodic. In 2005, some 92 million records were compromised as the result of a reported inside job. Two years later, TK/TJ Maxx saw 94 million compromised records, followed by Sony PlayStation’s 77 million in 2010. 

Yahoo saw an astonishing 3 billion user accounts stolen in 2013, and a year later 145 million Ebay records suffered a similar fate. As did 76 million records from JP Morgan Chase in 2014, 80 million from Anthem in 2015, and 145 million Equifax accounts in 2017.

No sector is immune, and as technology continues to grow and develop, so do the chances of data attacks. Market intelligence firm, International Data Corporation (IDC), has predicted that by 2020 more than 1.5 billion people worldwide will be affected by data breaches. Meanwhile, in its 2017 Data Breach Level Index, digital security firm Gemalto noted that the number of data records compromised in publicly disclosed data breaches surpassed 2.5 billion – up 88 per cent from 2016. This equates to more than 7 million records lost or stolen every day, or 82 every second.