so there have been plenty of reports in the news lately about large-scale data
breaches caused by everything from clever hacking to poor security
practices to somebody just leaving a flash drive
lying around but once everyone's email addresses passwords and credit card
numbers get stolen what actually happens to all that information i mean is there
just like a walmart for cybercriminals where they go to buy your personal
information at rollback prices and if your information is indeed part of a
massive breach how do you find out what are the appropriate precautions
so one thing that's helpful in understanding what happens after a data
breach is to realize the sheer scope of
many of them it's not uncommon for these breaches to affect tens of millions of
people at once and sometimes even more so that means that it isn't particularly
easy for an individual user to search through large databases of stolen
information especially considering the sorts of places that information ends up
oftentimes this data actually will appear on dark web markets that require
special software to access them where it is indeed
bought and sold by cyber criminals hoping to rack up fraudulent charges
drain someone's bank account or even commit outright identity theft
now you can learn more about the dark web here but it turns out that this isn't
the only place where personal data can appear in fact sometimes it'll show up
in a much more public pastebin site
what's a pastebin site you might ask well it's kind of the digital equivalent
of the inside of a bathroom stall wall they're designed for anyone to just dump
a large amount of data as plain text and these things can be great
for folks like coders who want others to check their code for errors or i mean
just anyone who needs a place to quickly jot down a non-sensitive information
in recent years though some pastebin sites have become hotbeds for stolen
data procured from data breaches now some of this data is put there by
hacktivists who don't seek to make much if any money off of their exploits while
other leaks are partially dumped to pastebin sites by attackers as a free
sample of a larger dataset that they expect to get paid for on one of the
aforementioned darknet markets and while anyone can bring up data
that's dumped to a paste bin it's not exactly easy for the average consumer to
go hunt for their credentials one by one
after they heard about the latest big data breach on the news
there is good news though there are easier ways to keep tabs on your logins
and passwords there are services that try to catalog dark net leaks and that
automatically detect when large data dumps appear on paste bins then organize
them into databases and save them even if the original data gets taken down one
of the best known of these services is have i been pwned which works by having
you enter your email address which it then checks against a database of
billions of leaked account records to see if you've been affected by a breach
have i been pwned uses a bot to monitor pastebin sites for new submissions
containing credentials and passwords it offers email notifications if the site
finds your info in a recent breach and it also allows users to enter their own
passwords to check against the database as well
which sounds like a terrible idea
but don't worry have i been pwned employs an algorithm that keeps your
password secure when you test them by hashing them then only sending the first
five characters of the hash to a server that contains the database of known
breached passwords after any matching hashes are found
they're sent back to your pc which can then determine if your entire hash
password is the same as any of the passwords found in the database if you
don't know what a hash is by the way you can learn all about them
right up here this functionality has actually also
been built into some password managers which can even tell you if your
credentials have been found in a recent data dump so
that's cool but then what if you follow these steps and your details have been
compromised well step one is to change your passwords step two is to contact
your bank and credit card companies if your email was tied to those accounts
and get in touch then with step three one of the major credit reporting
agencies once you've contacted them you can do basic things like freezing your
credit for free or if you want something a little less
intrusive than having your credit frozen you can pay for credit monitoring which
will send you a report when anyone tries to open a new account or apply for
credit in your name and that last one
i know it's kind of a pain and to be quite frank i don't want to advocate for
those credit monitoring companies because i think at least some of them
are a bunch of yahoos and i don't mean that in like uh yahoo the company way i
just i mean they're idiots i remember being on the phone with one
of them and complaining that their site doesn't support two-factor authentication even though there's a
blog post on their site from like three years ago recommending that you turn
two-factor authentication on for any sensitive accounts like and the guy he
didn't even the guy on the phone okay low-level customer service person
whatever didn't even know what 2fa was you have a lot of sense of information
in there anyway it's all you can really do and it's
really important in the event of a leak that you take action swiftly if your
information is out there because in some cases the company responsible for the
leak might cover your monitoring fees anyway and the thing is is like you
never know what could come back to bite you
and where
and if you don't want anything to bite you check out bitdefender total security
2019. their best in class security solutions for Windows mac Android and
iOS have been awarded outstanding product of the year by av comparatives
and they're trusted by over 500 million users worldwide that is half of a
billion network threat prevention detects attacks including botnets and stops them
before they begin and also prevents your sensitive information from being sent in
an unencrypted format you also get ransomware protection a vpn service
parental controls and autopilot a security advisor that provides
contextual recommendations based on your device's usage and needs
all of this is backed by comprehensive 24 7 support so check out the link below
for more details as well as a special giveaway
so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a
comment if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible and don't forget
to subscribe and ring the bell icon
that's weird when you click it it doesn't ring
also also they changed the bell icon so make sure you've got the bell icon on
right there's off and then there's like on a bit and then there's like on all
the time you want that one