2018 Will Be The Year Of HR Data Theft

If 2018 becomes the year of HR data theft, make sure, you are not the victim

- Abhijit Bhaduri

Very recently, a disgruntled Twitter employee on his last day of work, deactivated the Twitter account of Donald Trump. This, although an isolated example of what employees can do to organization’s data or confidential information, simply tells us that no individual or company is safe from breaches or cyber threats – big or small.

We all know that data is the new oil!

But if data is the new oil, it comes with a new price — of data manipulation and breach!

And that’s why you need to make sure that the oil pipe is not leaking!

The digital world runs on data and allows an organization to create an offering that is specific to an individual. When you use Google to search for something, the results that show up vary depending on the browser you use, your location and if you have signed in to Google or not. The data collected from billions of users allows Google to sell advertisements that are intended to appeal to the individual user.

Breached today, realized months later!

The pattern is clear about data breaches. The hackers sneak in to the databases. Since they are in stealth mode, their presence is not detected for months. Could it be that your employees’ data has been compromised and you are blissfully unaware?

If you had a Yahoo email account, or have used one of its services like Flickr etc., it is quite likely that it was one of the one billion accounts that were hacked in 2013. It was one of the largest breaches ever. In October 2017, when Verizon, the new owner of Yahoo employed cyber-security professionals to comb through the details of the breach, they found that three billion records were affected. Talking of Verizon, the Phone numbers, names and pin codes of six million Verizon customers were left online for around nine days because of a wrong configuration.