Exposed: What Happens After Your Data Gets Breached

A data breach feels personal because it's kind of personal while the attack itself is on like a big corporation.

And you and I, we just kind of get caught up in the middle of this whole thing.

The details of our life are now open to the dark web and criminals without fault of our own.

And it feels personal because that feels like an act of betrayal.

When we hear about another company getting hacked, it's easy to think, oh, it's just another news story, just another headline, another corporate failure.

But what's actually being stolen in these breaches is people's lives in digital form.

And before I get into what you should do to help survive a data breach, I think it's important to understand what a data breach actually is, why it happens, and why our information is so valuable in the first place.

A data breach is when unauthorized people gain access to information that was supposed to be protected.

This is a group like Shiny Hunters, I'm sure you've heard a lot about them, as they seem to be hacking everybody right now and holding mass amounts of information, including personal data, ransom until somebody pays them off.

Seems like it's just a weekly thing at this point.

Now these bad actors can target a school system, a big box store, a hospital, or a third party that verifies identities for other companies.

Sometimes hackers break into systems directly.

Sometimes employees are tricked through phishing attacks.

Sometimes software vulnerabilities are exploited.

And sometimes companies simply fail to secure the information in the first place.

I'm surprised at how often security researchers are finding open data sets on unencrypted drives just connected to the internet.

Like, oh, hey, here's all this information.

It's valuable information.

And this company just hasn't secured it.

And depending on the company that's breached, the type of information can vary dramatically.

A retail company might lose your email address, your phone number, home address, purchase history, and maybe your payment information.

A health care company may expose your medical records, insurance information, prescriptions, social security numbers, and billing information.

And a school system breach might expose student records, birthdays, addresses, parent information, private chats, and even disciplinary records.

And then there are those really severe breaches where criminals will get access to social security numbers, driver's license numbers, passport information, security questions, passwords, and even authentication data.

That information becomes incredibly valuable to criminals because modern fraud is built on real information.