Written by
Keeper Security
A few weeks ago a new data breach was in the news and unlike many breaches, it wasn’t due to any nefarious activity – it came about because of lax security practices. In this case, social media influencer data broker Social Data left a database of almost 235 million social media profiles exposed online with no password protection or other authentication required for access per Comparitech.
The incident involved YouTube, TikTok and Instagram profiles and while it didn’t expose passwords and only included phone numbers and email address for around 20% of the accounts, it did offer anyone finding the unsecured data a wealth of user data including:
The breach itself wasn’t overly damaging. The data was scraped from publicly available information although the scraping violated all three social media platforms’ terms of use.
Breaches are always happening – 540 occurring in the first half of 2020, and that’s just the breaches that are known and disclosed. The actual number is unknown because many known breaches are never publicly disclosed and most likely many more remain undiscovered.
What Can You Do?
The reality of data security and online privacy is daunting, but in many ways, password security is the first line of defense against breaches. Strong passwords are great but don’t mean much when the cybercriminal already has that strong password in hand.
Digital security experts preach regularly changing passwords for this very reason – as you’re reading this, you might be one of the people who received a notice from a provider stating their passwords were potentially exposed during a data breach and it would be prudent to change all their passwords.
The solution is to take control and advantage of a password manager, such as Keeper.
Keeper has plans tailored for both consumers and businesses that take the worry out of reading about the latest data breach. These solutions eliminate the need for keeping track of multiple passwords and make it easy to manage all your accounts with strong passwords.
Keeper takes only minutes to install, requires no special equipment or installation costs, and is designed to be user friendly. Users can even import passwords from their web browsers, text files, or spreadsheets. Afterward, Keeper evaluates the imported passwords and warns users about weak, reused, or compromised passwords.
Not a Keeper customer yet? Sign up for a free trial now!
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