Organisations are now faced with attackers who want to steal businesses’ customer data to carry out identity theft and banking fraud. In 2018, Facebook discovered an unprecedented data breach issue that affected almost 50 million user accounts. The attack was actually not discovered for a year. This allowed the attackers to literally take over people’s accounts by stealing their access tokens.

Google also fell prey to these malicious attacks in 2018. On October 8, Google announced that it is going to shut down Google+ after it discovered a security vulnerability that exposed up to 500,000 users’ private data. In December 2018, Google again announced that it has found another vulnerability for the second time and this has affected 52.5 million Google+ accounts including some some of its business customers.

Marriot International also reported in November 2018 that there was an unauthorised access to the reservation database that exposed up to 500 million guests which makes it the second largest data breach.

Companies and organisations needs to implement robust information security strategies in order to protect their customers, keep their market shares and bottom line, stay out of jail, and still sell their products. This is why it has become necessary for organisations to start outsourcing this to the security experts in order for them to fully concentrate on their day to day running of their businesses.

Individuals are not exempt from these attacks as attackers are always devising new ways to steal their data. I will be sharing with you 10 steps that would protect each individual from getting hacked in my next blog.