Data Breaches

Data Breaches:

The New Normal We’re Not Ready for

Data breaches have become the norm; here’s what you can do.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been scammed online, had your credit card stolen, or had to change your passwords because you received an email saying, “Your password has been compromised.” Raise both hands if it’s happened more than once. Oops, don’t drop your phone.

The spectrum of nuisance to crisis makes everyday online life feel like rolling the dice — from being locked out of your Facebook account because someone hacked it, to having your social security number leaked and your identity stolen.

Unfortunately, these serious data breaches are becoming more common, leaving more people vulnerable to attack than ever before.

Let’s explore some of the most significant breaches and data leaks in recent years.

From 2013 to 2016

No yeehaw or woohoo here — Yahoo Email User Accounts Hacked

If you created an email account in the mid-90s through the mid-2000s, chances are it was a Yahoo account. This vast number of user accounts turned Yahoo into a big data whale, ripe for a team of Russian hackers.

Approximately 3 billion user accounts were compromised, including personal information like names, addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers.

May 2019

Get a mortgage, get leaked — First American Financial Corporation’s major client data leak

This real estate finance company that offers insurance, records management, banking, trust, and wealth management services also offered up a lot in 2019 when its website experienced an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) error that exposed 885 million files.

The leak included people’s personal and financial information like social security numbers and driver’s licenses, bank account numbers and statements, and other sensitive mortgage documents.

April 2021

Posters, Taggers, and Pokers Beware — Facebook’s Major Data Breach

One of the world’s biggest tech companies, Facebook, has an infamous history with data security. In 2021, it added another major breach to the list when a platform flaw in its contact-syncing tool was hacked, exposing more than 530 million users’ names, phone numbers, account names, and passwords.

Since the breach, is Facebook now safer to use?

Facebook paid a $5 billion fine (its net earnings in 2021 were nearly $40 billion) and ramped up its privacy and data security teams to hopefully avoid another costly leak.

But as its storied history sings, it is now deprioritizing data privacy and security to maximize productivity and its bottom line. For example, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, recently laid off teams responsible for site security, privacy, and content moderation. Additionally, a fact-checking project that was in the testing phase was discontinued. These cuts bolster a strategy to streamline operations and focus on artificial intelligence and augmented reality.

This list is just a drop in the bucket of breaches, leaks, and data exposures.

Put simply: your information is not safe — not on major websites, not when you’re shopping IRL, not when banking online. By virtue of you or your loved ones interacting in society, you become vulnerable to having data about you exposed and exploited.

Do you think your information has been exposed?

Here’s one website that creates profiles of people’s personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and related family member information. Visit https://besthistorysites.net/ and type in your name or a family member’s name.

You may be surprised at how much of your information is out there.

Now that you know how much of your personal information may be exposed online, you may wonder, “How do hackers use personal data”?

As if that wasn’t enough, beyond the numbers and letters that comprise your identity, another vital feature has been exposed on the web and puts you at risk for sinister situations. It’s your face.

Sharing photos may leave you exposed to deepfake situations.

Since the advent of Myspace, then Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok, posting personal photos and videos online has become a social rite of passage. Your online persona and identity legitimize your social existence, but people may not realize that the web is written in ink.

You can cancel your account, delete your photos, or throw your laptop in the ocean, but centralized tech companies will still have everything you’ve ever posted.

Here’s what’s happening with your photos (along with your other personal information )

Your information is being used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI), and opting out is not easy. Since AI is only as powerful as the data it uses to learn, companies like Meta feed their users’ content into training models to improve their AI’s ability to recognize people, places, and things.

So yes, all your embarrassing middle school and high school photos have quietly been fed into AI training models for years, all to improve how well Meta can recognize and identify you.

Beyond using your face and voice as a training tool, opportunities for sabotage and other alarming possibilities are on the rise. Using deepfake technology and scraping the internet for photos and videos, people can use AI to generate hyper-realistic but entirely fake videos or images. In one infamous example, fake celebrity pornographic images were posted and viewed online 45 million times before being removed.

Celebrities who have thousands of high-definition images, videos, and voice samples are at the highest risk. However, as AI technology develops, this threat is befalling anyone and everyone pictured online. For example, “nudifier” apps are now being used to create AI generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This is occurring at such a rapid scale, that law enforcement officials are struggling to find and prosecute the many offenders.

Whether it’s your bank info, face, or identity, you could be vulnerable to attack if you’re not proactive. What used to be a simple photo dump from college or an online purchase could one day fuel a deepfake scandal or identity fraud.

Use these suggestions to protect your information and privatize your digital life — because when it comes to your personal data, the most dangerous thing you can do is nothing.

Follow Sia on Bluesky, X, Instagram, and TikTok to learn more about protecting your digital footprint from breaches and leaks.

Thank you to Sabrina Dorfman for contributing to this article.

Data Breaches was originally published in The Sia Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.