The Biggest Data Breaches in 2021 and How You can Protect your Company’s Data

Oh data. Considered by many to be this generation's gold - you can learn so much from it, which is exactly why many countries have pretty strict regulations on what you can do with it and how you have to save your data. But unfortunately, companies often get data breaches. And not just your regular mom and pop store, no, even giant companies get hacked. In this article we talk about three of the biggest data hacks from last year ... and what you have to do to protect your data! 

Throwback: Three of the Biggest Data Breaches in 2021

Every year, a big company makes the news for a data breach. Uh-oh! 

Facebook: 500 million users, April 2021: a ton of information, such as IDs, names, dates of births, locations and even relationship statuses belonging to over 550 million Facebook users got published online in April last year. The data was collected in 2019 through a technique called 'scraping' and only now surfaced. Creepy! 

LinkedIn: 700 million users, June 2021: Our favorite professional network also struggled with a major data breach - about 93% of all users' data ended up for sale on the dark web... for just $5,000. You would almost call 700 million names, phone numbers, geolocations, genders and more for 5K a steal! 

T-Mobile: Did you know that a 21-year-old stole the names, addresses, social security numbers and more of around 50 million T-Mobile clients? We were doing other things at that age! 

How do Data Breaches Happen?

There are a multitude of reasons why data breaches happen. Obviously, it's possible that your IT infrastructure is flawed in one way or another. Often, hackers will try to find weak spots in your security or in the programs you use. 

But more than often they get in due to human error. Super annoying for your IT crowd or the company you hired that takes care of your managed services. Many people still think they can spot all phishing mails because they used to be super easy to spot: emails from foreign princes or long lost relatives... often asking for money. Nowadays, hackers often send very targeted emails with an email address that looks very believable. They'll email as the CFO to a secretary and change an 'i' into a 'l', for instance. One click is all it takes... That's why it's super important to train all employees to recognize phishing emails. 

While it even happens to the biggest businesses, you don't want a data breach to happen to your business. That's why it's always important to focus on the security of your new-age gold, aka data!