Data Theft Phenomenon

Posted on August 21, 2019

In this hyperconnected era, every matter is a piece of cake. You can buy everything anywhere and at anytime! You can pay with your credit or debit card, mobile banking, or even using a digital wallet app. But, did you know that there’s one thing that you should be concerned about? It’s about your data privacy and data theft!

What is Data Theft?

Data theft is the act of obtaining information illegally that copied or taken from a company or other individuals. Data obtained from the unknowing victims through their servers or devices. This act intends to obtain private information, such as passwords, social security numbers, credit card information, and other personal information. Data theft is such a huge problem for individual computer users, as well as big corporate firms. Data theft could happen both outside and inside the company. This condition makes the insider of data theft would be harder to determine.

Method of Data Theft

Here are some well-known methods of data theft that used by hackers:

Bluesnarfing

There are so many ways to perform this evil act. One of the classic ways of data theft is Bluesnarfing. Bluesnarfing allows some access to contacts, pictures, videos, just like Bluetooth did. The main difference is Bluesnarfing method has unauthorized access to the information, which means it is unknown by the victim.

Formjacking

Formjacking invades online retailers to access and obtain private payment information details. As disclosed by Symantec, Formjacking is the use of malicious JavaScript code that attacks e-commerce sites to steal credit card details information from payment forms. Formjacking is not the most sophisticated one, but it gives an enormous deadly impact.

Account hijacking

Account hijacking is an act of impersonating the account owner, using the compromised account. This act is performed through phishing, delivering spam messages to the user, password guessing, etc. Account hijacking would give access to fetch the owner’s personal information, perform transactions and activity details, and ask the account owner’s contacts for any illegal activity.

Data Theft in Indonesia.

Data Theft Phenomenon is one of the viral topics that aired on the news in Indonesia recently. Far from today, data theft has already existed in a different form. In the past, data theft took their game on credit card fraud. At that time, the fraud existed, but it didn’t go as berserk as today.

This topic is flaring up nowadays because there are groups that sell people’s private data such as their photos and even their national identity cards massively. This information fraud occurs because the stolen data is needed as a requirement for special features on any digital wallet or fintech app. This condition made worse by the clarity absence of private data security law and regulation. So, the most upcoming agenda of the government is to give the clarity of private data security law and regulation.

How to Avoid Data Theft?

If you want to feel safer when you sail through the internet, here are simple ways to reduce your worries.

Use a strong password
Don’t use the same password for many accounts
Don’t autosave your password
Disable pop-up pages
Their page should be encrypted
Say no to Free-VPN

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