12mo ago

What's up with all this data breaches and leaks?

Was this always happening in this big scope? Leaks of games, data that is stolen, all these breaches in big companies. Feels like I see this everyday

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The GDPR enforces that data breaches are made public, so you may have seen a rise in publicly known breaches, starting in 2018.
- Many companies in the US have been reporting their breaches since the early 2010’s. All 50 states have some sort of breach notification law on the books.
  
  I have no hard data, but from being in the industry + reading the news, my impression has been that the number of known data breaches went up significantly, even for US companies. Is the punishment maybe just completely laughable in those US laws?
  That was the case here in Germany. The GDPR is heavily inspired by our data protection law (BDSG), that we had in place since the 90s. With a significant amendment, which is that punishment went up from at most 300,000€ to 20 billion € (and even more for big companies).
  For many companies, this was when they realized, they actually have to adhere to data protection laws. Suddenly, we had non-IT companies reporting data breaches, which was essentially not a thing beforehand.

security is hard and complex. companies don’t hire security people.
- Security people can help, but often can't. The issue is with software design, and most companies struggle to properly fund that.
  
  In addition, I don't have data to back it up, but I feel like social engineering plays at least a part in many if not most of the big hacks we see happening
  
  Yeah, it's a struggle with there are a dozen zero days a year for multiple brands/applications. I have at least 4 people always doing some sort of upgrade or patch being reported by infosec.
- My tinfoil hat security cycle is as follows
  Company experiences a breach > Hire an expensive internal security team > wait 3 financial quarters > new suits wonder why they spend $$$ on security if nothing has happened > lighten security team
  
  There is money to be made in getting hacked.
- Or companies do hire security, but the security team is incompetent and unable/unwilling to adapt to new challenges. Then it devolves into security theater, until either someone new comes who cleans house or a breach happens.

We've gotten better at reporting them
- Still a very small subset of the data breaches out there.
  Think about it.
  Start with the total amount of data breaches. Narrow that further to the data beaches that someone noticed. Narrow that further to the data breaches they reported. Narrow further to the ones that you have heard about.
  What you know about it is a trailing indicator of the total incidences.
- We’ve gotten better at reporting them
  Close. There are more laws requiring reporting within certain timeframes. Few companies report when they are not forced to.

Yes, breaches have always happened. There have been some very high profile ones in the past like Sony and Adobe that caused governments to create laws forcing registered businesses to disclose breaches where Personal Identifiable Information is accessed. So you are hearing more because they are forced to disclose more.
The other side is hacking tools have become far more powerful with a much lower barrier to entry.
Previously you needed to find and build your own tools for exploits. A considerable amount of private hacking groups will sell access to their tools for others to use leading to the rise of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS). Hackers poking fun at the current XaaS naming (SaaS, IaaS, etc.)

Ashley Madison
Equifax
23 and Me
those are the only ones I know off the top of my head because those are the ones that affected me. (my ex-husband was on the AM list; I was affected by the Equifax breach; my daughter was affected by the 23 and me breach)
- Ooo. Really sorry to hear about your husband doing that. :-(
  
  No problem. I thought it was hilarious.
  And I didn't say husband. I clearly said ex-husband.
- The 23 and me stuff is expecially scary. It is bad enough giving out genetic information to a company. It is even worse when that information is stolen.
  Anyone interested in using a gentic ancestry service should read the book Genethics by David Suzuki & Peter Knudtson first. TLDR if a big enough genetic data bank is aquired by the wrong hands, discriminatory practices could increase significantly in job interviews, health insurance and other sectors. Chemical warfare could also be specifically tuned to specific genetic groups.
- My mortgage company had a breach and I saw three articles about three different companies having breachs. That and I think OP is also talking about the video game code leaks.
  
  Yeah like kinda everything. Wasn't sure if it's just more reports. In the end it's a mix of all the systems.
  I thought i missed something. But all you folk's provided good information for me and i am thankful for this
  
  As someone in the thick of it, it has been a nervewracking quarter for mortgage company IT and Infosec teams. There have been several very high profile breaches the last few months.
- Also mint mobile recently but yeah data = money. Had to search up Ashley Madison and I'm sorry you went through that

In my experience, it’s always been this bad. However, as the world becomes more connected, it becomes easier to find systems to break into and easier to find ways to break in. It’s only recently that most countries have enacted legislation to enforce mandatory reporting of data breaches, and so we hear more about them.
Cyber security has always been (and probably always will be) an arms race between those who want to secure data and those who want to steal it. As the value and usefulness of data goes up, so does the desire of the bad guys to steal it. Identity theft and just plain ransoming of data are only ever going to increase.
Use:
a password manager
a different random password or pass phrase for every site
a different random email address for each site (Apple’s “Hide my Email”; Firefox Relay; DuckDuckGo mail; 33mail, for example)
different false details as much as possible for every site
Don’t:
Use the same details (name, password, email address) on every site
use your real details if you can possibly avoid it. If you must, misspell your details (“Johhn Smith”, “1 Maiin Street”) so that you can track the misuse of your data.
- Or buy a domain and run all your email through a catchall with different emails for different services.
  Netflix @johnsmith.com, fishingworld @johnsmith.com etc.
  Makes it easy to tell who cant be trusted.
  
  fishingworld
  Thought that said "fistingworld" and almost spilled my drink

Yes—it’s why you should use a password manager to generate a unique password for each and every site you sign up for, and think long and hard before trusting any site (or any org for that matter) with your personal information.
Haveibeenpwned.com is a website for checking which sites have leaked your data.
- Make sure it's an offline password manager. It's a really bad idea to allow your password database to be stored on someone else's server.
  
  LastPass had a breach recently too
  I think Bitwarden and Keypass are the good recommendations. Both can be kept local or selhosted.
  If you're coming from LastPass and want something basically 1:1 similar (ex. Don't want to set up local / self hosted), Bitwarden is an easy switch

Data is worth money. If your bank left the back door open all the time, I’m sure people would walk in and steal money. Same thing.

i mean, are there ever consequences to the companies? how often does it actually affect their bottom line?
it keeps happening because companies doing very little to stop it because they have little incentive to.

My personal opinion: those hackers are probably not that clever nor smart, it's just that companies doesn't often properly follows security best practices despite storing plenty amount of sensitive information.

IMHO, the biggest recent change is visibility to breach notifications. The notifications have been going out in many places for over a decade, but now there are lots of products that easily expose that information to people and the media.

Some companies have found that leaks create hype, especially for games. League of Legends is infamously known to get everything leaked, probably on purpose. Until players get fed up with it, at least.

any system or network is only as strong as its weakest component - in many cases, people are the weakest component.

Thank you for all the answers and also tips
....time to live in the woods :D

I'd say that some time ago there weren't that many leaks because not so much data was stored. But sites were modified to show spam and such.

It's the new normal.

I've been exposed so many times throughout the years, the mails were automatically moved to the spam folder.

Cyber security guy here.
Consider a large organization with a lot to lose. They usually invest proactively in a Cyber security program.
Now consider all these companies with data breaches. They were tiny startups with nothing to lose. No reason to consider an investment in cyber security best practices. Their modus operandi was quickly pushing the product to market so that the $ could start coming in.

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