Recent cyber breaches a reminder to safeguard sensitive information
Posted September 3, 2018 1:19 pm.
Last Updated September 3, 2018 1:20 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
METRO VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Cyber security has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately, from the breach at Air Canada to a hack of West Vancouver’s servers.
So many are wondering, how can we best protect ourselves online?
The people responsible for the Air Canada breach late last August may have gotten a hold of things like phone numbers and email addresses, but for users trying to speed up online bookings, it’s possible more personal things like passport numbers or NEXUS information were also exposed.
It is believed that some 20,000 Air Canada customers were targeted.
Dominic Vogel with the online security firm Cyber SC tells NEWS 1130 these recent breaches should make us think twice about what info we decide to share.
“It’s a good reminder for people to always have that moment of pause before putting in information to any mobile app, even if they feel they trust it,” Vogel says. “They should really be reflecting on exactly what information they should be putting in there and if it’s not needed,they shouldn’t do it.”
Convenience should not trump security
While it may be convenient to opt in to allowing companies or organizations to keep certain information saved on their systems to speed up things like bookings, that convenience may not always be worth the potential risk, according to Vogel.
“If it’s your name, your e-mail address, your address, that’s all, for the most part, public information,” says Vogel. “If something happens to that [data], you might get a more targeted phishing e-mail, but nothing serious is going to happen.
“But if you’re putting out your social insurance number into a whole bunch of different mobile apps, or your passport number, or your driver licence number, these are all things which are much, much harder to replace and can have a far greater negative effect from an identity theft perspective.”
In West Vancouver, city staff noticed in July that hackers installed malware on the district’s servers which stored personal information from online web forms on district issues. Over 4,800 people’s records are thought to have been compromised.
Vogel says this is also a wake-up call for businesses and large organization, suggesting they test their systems by bringing in outside firms to take a closer look.
“So many businesses are just having that big effort to get out onto the web, have mobile apps,” says Vogel.
“Businesses need to slow down and not just worry about getting things out there and focusing on functionality. They really need to understand the importance of having a third party rigorously test, from a security perspective, the code, the mobile application, and see that it’s at least battle hardened.”