Data breaches have become part of our everyday reality affecting governments, businesses, and individuals alike. In this blog post series, we take a look at recent breach incidents, analyse how they happened, and examine what can be done for your protection.
What Happened?
A stock photograph website called 123RF suffered a data breach. The website sells royalty-free images, videos, and audio content. According to SimilarWeb, 123RF receives over 26 million visitors per month. Recently, bad actors began selling a database containing 8.3 million user records stolen from 123RF.com on a hacker forum.
What Information Was Involved?
- Full names
- User names
- IP addresses
- Phone numbers
- Email addresses
- Password hashes
- Facebook profile links
- Addresses including postcodes
- Date of account registration on 123RF
- Location including country, states, and cities
What Are the Risks to You?
Once your sensitive information is stolen in a data breach, there’s a high risk for it to be sold on the dark web. Even though the personal information stored on different websites and services varies greatly, cybercriminals can easily match the stolen records from different databases to complete personal profiles or establish fake identities with real pieces of your information. They don’t even have to buy this info on the blackmarket. There is a legal way to obtain it from people-search sites that expose your personal details to anyone willing to pay for them. Cybercriminals can then use your sensitive records to conduct identity fraud crimes including tax identity theft, bank fraud, medical identity theft, Social Security scams, and many more.
It is crucial to safeguard your accounts and identity by updating your passwords for online subscriptions and services. This will help further protect you from account takeover attacks, data breaches, identity theft and other cyber crimes.
Is There Anything You Can Do?
Tips to protect your personal information from a data breach:
- Limit the amount of sensitive information you keep on certain sites. Many websites suggest you store your payment information for the sake of convenience. This way you don’t have to reenter it every time you buy something. We strongly advise against it — if the site is breached, hackers will have access to this information.
- Monitor your personal information on the web. There’s a high chance your sensitive details are already published on people-search engines. You can check that by using OneRep. If it’s been found on multiple sites, you can take action to remove your data, monitor its reappearance, and reduce the chances of being exposed to security risks.
- Be careful with any calls and emails you receive. After data breaches, phishing scams often increase as cybercriminals hope to take advantage of consumers’ confusion.
- Enable two-factor authentication. Putting an additional level of security on your accounts and mobile apps prevents hackers from gaining access to your data stored on 3rd party services.
- Use a password management system. Investing in a password manager is a way to safeguard your passwords, which alleviates the pressure to remember all of your logins and empowers you to update site passwords frequently.
- Сheck your email address with a data breach protection tool to see if it has been exposed in a data breach.
Stay Informed
To protect your identity, use the precautionary steps above and follow us on Facebook and Twitter for future data breach alerts.
If you suspect your personal information was compromised in a data breach, be vigilant about monitoring your personal info. Sign up for OneRep’s 5-day trial to build up your protection from fraud.
Check if people-search sites expose your info
OneRep’s algorithm scans 196 data broker sites for your profiles, and makes sure your private information is removed.
