Are We Secure? Privacy Breach Is Hitting The Internet

Tapping away messages on our phone, storing private pictures and putting a number/pattern lock in an ideal world should be enough to protect your data, right?

If we have decided to fall in love with internet then we also need to accept the flaws and work on securing ourselves online too.

No social networking site guarantees hacking free experience and we have no idea what kind of protection programs are being run to make sure our data on net remains private. Are serious efforts being taken? How often do we think about this? And why should we? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who just see the package without caring about the technicalities that goes in to making internet/gadgets work?

Some real life incidents related to privacy breach make us rethink our position on internet and concerns for privacy rise up. How safe is our data really? We store our lives in our beloved phones, therefore it’s important that we need to be aware whether security policies are really working or not.

Let’s re-read four major incidents on four different platforms that clearly explain why we need to put that extra effort.

Whatsapp Hack

When a mysterious app emerged in Android market, it seemed like a prank. But in reality it was a very simple display window to everybody’s Whatsapp messages. Simplicity of this technique could make any jealous boyfriend/girlfriend spy on their partners. A quick download made everyone ‘easy hackers’. It just went on to prove how easy it was to hack into Whatsapp and get access to all the messages that Whatsapp backs up every 24 hours. Very soon, this application was removed from the market but internet is still filled with million ways to hack into Whatsapp data of people around.

Eye of the webcam

With thousands of hacking softwares available in the market, few of them are made for accessing someone’s webcam and the victim won’t have any idea. Imagine all your private Skype calls being witnessed by an invisible third party and your internet browsing sessions turned into spying minutes.  Cassidy Wolf, Miss teen USA 2013 whose webcam was hacked in 2013 had received anonymous mails threatening her to go public with her images if she didn’t provide the mailer with her nude pictures. Getting to know suddenly one day that there was always a third pair of eyes secretly watching you would turn your world upside down and can take time to recover but to stop cyber crimes, Cassidy went out to file a complaint instead.

Celebrities attacked by icloud data leak

Celebrities are already a huge obsession among people, they are the most followed, liked, hash tagged and talked about. One step taken and it’s on every YouTube channel, website, Facebook share and Twitter trends. People have made a business by obsessing over them and this obsession takes new height combined with the thirst to know there every movement. This is the reason why the famous icloud hack, with around 100 celebrities was a shocker but not hard to explain. With cleanly measured phishing attacks, hackers got into private storage which contained backup pictures of users. The whole incident became a huge scandal and reminded us how celebrities can’t be normal people and that they should definitely go extra miles for protecting their data.

Ashley Madison

Dirty little secrets are meant to be kept under the sheets, because if they come out divorces happen. As seen in Ashley Madison case, an online site meant to give opportunities to married men/women for cheating on their partners. The site promised to keep the data private and delete their existence after payment of particular fees but that was not the case since when the site was hacked all data came pouring out. Now, many sites do it but because this one was on the spotlight and termed ‘immoral’ it got a higher position on to-be-hacked list. Reminder: All sites might not protect your data as well as they guarantee, so be careful.

In the fast moving generation of Internet, it is very important to be careful about our personal information getting shared on different platforms.

Be careful while store your data on social media or on your phone.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.