What is data breach?

A data breach is the intentional or unintentional release of secure or private/confidential information to an untrusted environment. In other terms this phenomenon include information disclosure, data leak, information leakage and also data spill.

Aadhaar Data Breach

In March of 2018 personal information's such as name, 12 digit Aadhaar Number, photographs, thumb prints, retina scan and more was leaked. The estimated impact was about 1.1 Billion people. Data breaches in India.

How does data breach occur?

Think about these facts,

• How many services do you use on the internet?
• How many companies have your data like email, name, mobile number etc.?
• How many abandoned accounts do you have on the internet?
• And finally how do you know that all these information's are safe there ?

Data breaches can occur due to various reasons like hacking, human error, social engineering, malware, unauthorized access to data etc. But studies show that there are higher rates of data breaches due to human error.

Have you been a part of data breach?

Most services use email id for verification purpose. So, lets check if our email id has been breached. You can use a website Have I been pawned? to check this.

How does this website works?

haveibeenpwned.com has a collection of data that have been breached. When you enter an email id they search through these data to find any match. If yes then they will provide you with the necessary details of the breach to take precautions. What should you do when you have a data breach?. First lets look at the severity of the breach. This website shows you what all the details have been leaked. In my case it was, I am pretty sure that most of the ⬆ data are important. As a first response you need to change the password of the account. If you are using same password for different accounts, then you should be more careful. Set up 2FA for additional security incase of a breach.