What is a Data Breach?
What do Facebook, Equifax, Yahoo, and others all have in common? They were all victims of a data breach. So what is a data breach? A Data breach is a security violation in which sensitive, protected, or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen, or used by an unauthorized individual. Other terms are unintentional information disclosure, data leak, information leakage, and data spill. So what does this mean in plain English? It means that the data you had on a platform was unintentionally exposed and stolen by a third party. The result of this breach is that these criminals use this data to try and gain access to your bank accounts, social platforms, and other platforms you regularly use.
Are you getting annoying phone calls from an unknown number soliciting you for information or selling products? This data usually comes from data purchased on hacker sites that were part of a data breach. Additionally, this information is often sold to others who use it to steal your identity or spoof you into providing them with money or other goods.
On average, we are seeing about ten (yes, ten) data breaches per week! At Reklaim, we think the number of breaches will only increase, which means you are increasingly exposed. As a result, we introduced our breach notification feature as part of our Privacy Tier . Each week we notify you if your data appears in any of the data breaches reported in the previous week.
If exposed to a data breach, a few things you should do right away are as follows:
Change your password(s) to eliminate access to your accounts.
Check your bank account for suspicious activity.
Reach out to the company to see what the impact is on you.
Notify the authorities.
Use a password protector like 1password to protect all of your passwords from future hacks.
Use sign-in with Apple on sites that provide it as Apple scrambles your email address, so the platform does not have your actual email address.
We hope this helps protect you and your data.
Team Reklaim
