Cybersecurity: Can it Ever be Secured?

The Internet is perhaps one of man’s greatest inventions. We cannot imagine how our lives would be without it. At the same time, the Internet gave rise to a more sophisticated way of robbing other people’s money. Just how safe is your data? Keeping your data safe is not just a responsibility of the web service providers and the merchants that we are dealing with. It is everyone’s responsibility.

All that it takes for the “web thieves” is to get access to our personal data such as our card or bank account information, Social Security numbers, and even those seemingly petty information such as our date of birth and addresses, and the result is them feasting on our hard-earned money. Recently, the world was abuzz about the flaws exposed by the so-called Heartbleed bug, a security flaw that has gone on undetected for the past 2 years until it was finally discovered and made public in April 7.

For the layman, it may seem hard to imagine how data security that goes through different layers of security could be breached? When it comes to the question of data security, passwords always come first to our minds. But how safe is your data with the use of passwords? Emails require passwords. Social networking sites require passwords. Online merchants require passwords. Everything that we do online will usually require us to use passwords.

Ironically, data breaches occur exactly when passwords are hacked, providing an open door to all our personal information. If you have not been seriously thinking about how safe is your data, then, it is about time that we take it seriously. Treat it the same way as you would treat your best-kept secrets. If there’s one thing that the Heartbleed bug did positively, it is that of addressing the question, how safe is your data?

Seriously ask this question when you are a regular user of these sites: Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Google, GoDaddy, Amazon Web Services, Intuit, LastPass, Minecraft, OKCupid, Soundcloud, Tumblr, Wunderlist, Apple, eBay, Facebook, H&R Block, Helathcare.gov, IRS, Netflix, and Twitter. Account users of the following sites have been advised to change their passwords. On the other hand, these sites have to fix the issue from their end as well to make sure that those who changed their password would not need to worry that their information would still be vulnerable to the breach caused by the Heartbleed bug.

To date, it has been reported that this issue has been mostly fixed. In any case, it is best practice to change passwords regularly, with or without data breach issues. For as long as we’re using the Internet, we should do our part to at least make it harder for the hackers to do their dreaded stuff. How safe is your data? We can only do so much, but do something just the same to try to keep it safe at all times.