The Incident
Earlier this month, we shared an update about how National Public Data in the US leaked 2.7 billion records. So you’re probably wondering, what the heck does that mean? What does that mean for security? What does it mean for our privacy? The unfortunate reality is those 2.7 billion records included a whole bunch of personal information like past addresses, full names of people, email addresses, and phone numbers.
Potential Threats
How could the bad guys potentially leverage this data? Well, there are a number of things they are doing with this data. Unlike most security breaches, this data wasn’t made for sale on the Dark Web. It was made freely available to anybody that wanted to download this treasure trove of information.
How to Stay Protected
To stay protected, make sure you follow these three key steps:
Watch Out for Sophisticated Phishing Attempts
With this data, hackers can now launch very sophisticated attacks that look very real because they have information that they could use to make the attacks look legitimate.
Be Wary of Scams
Just like with phishing attacks, telephone scams and other types of scams are going to be used by scammers to utilize this information to look very legitimate.
Monitor Your Credit Scores and Banking
With this information, threat actors could be using it to take out loans or do other types of financial transactions that could have a severe negative impact.
Final Thoughts
In this climate, it’s essential to be super cautious. Make sure that your families, your team members, your staff, and all of your business colleagues are aware of what could potentially happen with this data leak and how you can stay protected.
If you have questions, contact us and we’d be happy to speak more about what sort of things you can put in place to stay protected with information like this being widely available and what you can do to stay safe.
