Online security breaches that we all can learn from (best practises)
We say it a lot over at Winzum, but your customer safety online is genuinely one of the most important things to our entire business model, because if you aren’t happy, ultimately we aren’t happy either.
There have been articles on our blog before about the importance of data & cyber security that you can find here [The importance of data & cyber security], however there can never really be enough of these – it is one of the most important things to know in the modern world.
Keeping yourself safe online doesn’t have to be hard or scary, but you do need to know a little about what you’re doing in order to avoid security beaches and ultimately stay safe online. That is why we have decided to create a list of famous online security breaches we can learn from in order to keep you guys safe!
Yahoo 2013-2014
An online security breach at the web services provider Yahoo resulted in 3 billion user accounts being compromised across 2013-2014, and the worst thing is they didn’t announce this until 2016. Users online details such as real names, email addresses and passwords were all compromised, making this one of the largest online security breaches of all time.
The main mistake to take from the way Yahoo handled their online security breach was the fact that it took them so long to own up to it. The company lost pretty much all credibility due to the fact they didn’t come clean about the online security breach, and ended up being sold to Verizon for less than 5% of their valuation in the aftermath.
Customers were rightly angered too, because they were enable to make sure that they were able to stay safe online without knowing that any of their information had been compromised in the first place. One thing we know for sure at Winzum is that this level of online security breach would never happen!
Equifax 2017
Equifax is one of the largest credit bureaus in the US, and back in 2017 they encountered an online security breach of their own after an application vulnerability was discovered in their systems. The personal information of 143 million customers was stolen, as well as the credit card information of 209,000 customers.
In other words, it was a pretty serious online security breach, and what is worst is that Equifax appear to have completely ignored one of the main ways to stay safe online – know what you are doing to keep online data secure.
Let us elaborate… You see, it turned out that the Equifax 2017 online security breach was caused by the negligence of one single employee who was Chief of Security. This employee majored in music at university, so obviously his understanding of online security protocols wouldn’t have been as extensive as somebody who had studied it. We can all learn from this – if you want to stop online security breaches make sure you know how!