Data Breach Prevention to Protect Your Privacy

Data breaches in a nutshell: Data breaches happen every day. It has become more important than ever to understand what a data breach is, how it happens, and how we, as users, can prevent it.

A data breach is an incident when a person’s or a company’s sensitive information is stolen or given away unintentionally. This data could include names, email addresses, logins, passwords, credit card information, and other credentials.

Data breaches could be caused either by an outside individual or a person within an organization. So, there are various types of such incidents: deliberate attacks, unintentional accidents, human errors, or flaws in an organization's infrastructure. Weak passwords remain the most common reason why data breaches happen.

Big data breaches in 2022

• January 17, 2022: Hackers broke into almost 500 users’ wallets on Crypto.com and stole $18
  million in bitcoin and $15 million in Ethereum.
• March 21, 2022: The Lapsus$ hacker group breached the Okta authentication company. It
  was reported that 2.5% of its customers were affected by this incident.
• July 21, 2022: Hackers breached approximately 5.4 million Twitter users’ data and put it on
  sale with their phone numbers and email addresses.

Data breach prevention

First, let’s state the obvious – the better individuals or organizations inform and equip themselves to prevent data breaches, the less risk there is of one happening. As mentioned before, weak credentials are the main risk factor. Fortunately, resolving this problem is not difficult. You should always use long, strong, and unique passwords for every website or service you create an account for.

A strong password is at least 12 characters long. We also advise using both lower and uppercase letters and a combination of letters and numbers. Lastly, to ensure the difficulty of the password, it is essential to include at least one special character. The longer and more complex your password is, the harder it becomes for hackers to guess or crack it. Human error in cybersecurity is a common issue. The good news is that all of us have the power to minimize it. Tools such as password managers can help. They store our unique credentials in one place and help us create new and more secure passwords.

Prevent data breaches with NordPass

Created by Nord Security, NordPass is a password manager that helps users store, autosave, and autofill complex and unique passwords with one click. NordPass operates under zero-knowledge architecture. Furthermore, all your passwords and other private information in NordPass will be protected with xChaCha20 encryption. It is considered to be the future of encryption.

A NordPass Premium subscription offers an inheritance feature that can give family members and friends access to your passwords in case of emergency. Another great benefit of NordPass Premium? It will identify weak, old, and reused passwords with the Password Health tool. A Premium subscription will also improve your overall security by scanning the web for data leaks. You can discover if any of your sensitive data (emails, credit cards, or other private information) has been breached and improve the security of compromised accounts.