Data protection and privacy threats

When customers and employees share data with an organization, they trust that the data will be kept safe and used for the intended purpose only. It is important for organizations to protect the data from fraudulent activities, hacking attacks, phishing attempts, or identity theft.

In twenty nineteen, hackers scraped the personal data of Facebook users through vulnerabilities in the system and gained access to the sensitive information of millions of users. The hackers then used the stolen information to gain even more information on the victims from six hundred different countries.

It can appear that data protection and privacy threats only come from external sources with malicious intents, however, negligence from employees is a major threat to data protection and privacy.

An average employee might mistakenly send out an email containing sensitive information to the wrong person, transfer data to personal accounts to use their devices over weekends or holidays, or unknowingly fall victims to external phishing attacks. According to a report published by the Pone-mon Institute in twenty twenty-two, the cost of insider threats has gone up by fourty-four percent over the last 2 years with each incident costing an average of 15.4 million dollars.

In March and April of twenty twenty-one, a negligent employee at The Dallas Police Department deleted 23 terabytes of data. The employee had not been trained properly in moving data from cloud storage and it impacted around 17,500 cases with the Dallas County District Attorney’s office.

Data privacy, in some jurisdictions around the globe, is considered a fundamental human right. Thus, it is important that you understand the importance of data privacy and data protection to protect yourself as well as your organization from falling victim.

Next, you will learn about different data protection and privacy regulations across the globe.