Every now and then, data breaches make headlines. These breaches can hurt governments, organisations and individuals in many ways.
Governments worry about the nation's security being compromised, and business entities worry that the leaked information can damage their reputation.
Individuals may have to frequently change passwords, and experience a credit freeze.
These days, people are more careful about giving away personal details online or even to a company when they are required to register to receive a product.
They fear that their personal information will be sold to another party.
A personal data breach can happen anytime and anywhere: online, offline or through casual conversations between an un-suspecting person and a scammer.
The breach leads to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to personal data.
Our world has become increasingly reliant on technology and online data.
Hence the breaches are an omnipresent threat to all of us.
Such breaches have a serious impact on the individuals' private lives, including humiliation, discrimination, financial loss, and physical or psychological damage.
Data breaches have occurred frequently for decades.
According to visualcapitalist.com, a global online publisher focusing on markets, technology, energy and the global economy, a new record was set last year with more than 5.9 billion user records stolen.
Sensitive or confidential information was copied, transmitted or stolen.
The attacks usually target customers' or employees' personally identifiable information (PII), business intellectual property, corporate data and government data.
We have been told that data breaches were perpetrated by lone hackers, organised cybercrime groups and even rogue governments involved in espionage.
Stolen information is usually used in other criminal activities such as identity theft, credit card fraud and ransomware attacks.
The manipulation of personal data is pervasive.
How cybercriminals like Macau scam syndicates retrieve our personal information is beyond comprehension.
British social scientist David Ashworth, under the pen name Perri 6, wrote in his book The Future of Privacy: Private life and public policy that "personal information has become the basic fuel on which the modern business and government run".
The more we are on the Internet, the higher the probability that we are exposed to phishing or ransomware attacks.
A case in point. Maybank on Thursday released an advisory from the Malaysia Computer Emergency Response Team or MyCert about the latest fraud campaign, known as #SMSSpy, which targets Internet users.
MyCert says cybercriminals are using Android malware to steal people's online banking information.
Similarly, I was worried when I read about the leak of data of 22.5 million Malaysians born between 1940 and 2004.
The data was purportedly stolen from the National Registration Department (NRD) last month.
The data, which was sold online, has put the country's data security measures in the spotlight.
Home Minister Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainudin denied that it was an NRD data breach, but said the government was investigating the matter.
In my readings, I found the largest ever data breach occur-red in 2013 when three billion Yahoo accounts were compromised.
The massive hack accounted for about 30 per cent of the 9.9 billion user records stolen from the web sector.
The next most-impacted sectors were tech and finance, with two billion and 1.6 billion records stolen, respectively, over the years.
With so much of our personal data floating in cyberspace, we need to be extra careful by not allowing others to visit our password-protected sites.
We should also avoid uncertain sites and chatrooms. Let's be safe.
The writer, a former NST journalist, is a film scriptwriter whose penchant is finding new food
