Hey there!
Welcome to Life Noggin.
The internet is pretty awesome, we know this.
It’s what allowed my animator to create our wonderful Life Noggin universe!
But as cool as the internet can be, it can also connect people in bad, malicious ways.
It can be a place for hackers and data thieves to steal your personal information and then
sell it to the highest bidder.
So that makes me wonder, just how valuable is your information?
The numbers vary between sources on a bunch of this stuff, but your credit card details
could be worth anywhere from say $5 to $15 or more depending on how complete the information
is, while the login info to your favorite streaming service could go for about $10 to
the right buyer.
Often times the more the information is tied to your financials, and the more it’s something
that you can’t easily change, the more it’s worth to internet thieves.
That’s why your health record is a big one.
A report from the FBI back in 2014 said that cyber criminals could sell electronic health
records, or EHRs, on the black market at a rate of about $50 per partial record.
To see the scope of how much that can add up, they reported that in the first half of
2013, there were over two million health care records compromised — at least that they
knew about.
It can be pretty difficult to know when there’s a data breach in the healthcare space, often
taking longer to identify than other types of hacking.
And these types of attacks are likely going to get even worse.
An expert on cybersecurity said that ransomware attacks on hospitals are estimated to have
a fivefold increase by the year 2021 compared to what they were in 2018.
Though it’s not even just malicious hacking that you have to worry about.
A Protenus review of health data breaches in 2016 found that out of the 450 incidences
that they found, only a little under 27% of them were from hacking.
With a mix of wrongdoing and human error, insiders in the healthcare space were actually
responsible for about 43% of the incidences.
You can apply this same logic to your own personal devices — anyone who has physical
access to your information can steal if it’s not protected.
But how do actual hackers or scammers go about stealing your information?
Well, one way is through phishing.
Phishing is basically when a scammer uses fraudulent messages or copycat websites to
get you to share valuable personal information or install things like ransomware on your
devices that can lock you out of important files on your computer.
Ransomware is a type of malware, or “malicious software”, which is a broad term for certain
software that’s was created to gain access to or damage your devices, usually without
you knowing about it… until it’s too late.
Another big way for people to steal your info, and one that you might not be thinking about,
is if you are ever using an insecure network, like a public wifi.
Data that you send over this type of accessible connection is typically not secure or encrypted,
which leaves you open to attacks.
To internet thieves, using a public wifi is kinda like getting rid of all the security
at a bank.