Our Opinion
Odysseas explains that “a Turkish script kiddie decided to deface two of my unsuccessful sites.” The result is that they’re still down. He’s not a security specialist, can’t clean them himself, and just can’t justify the cost of paying a specialist to properly clean them. Sayak says, fortunately, he has not gone through a data breach yet. He has always taken precautions, such as using very strong passwords, creating dummy emails for registering for sites, etc. Now he tries not to expose his credit cards by saving payment information with PayPal or digital wallets. “When in doubt, cash is king.” He knows people who have had their Facebook or Gmail hacked, though, or money stolen from their accounts. But in each of these cases, they were very lax about their security. Ryan can’t resist knocking on wood as he says he hasn’t gone through a data breach yet. Like Sayak, he also uses secondary email accounts and alternative payment methods like PayPal to shield his more sensitive financial info. He feels that “common sense is your first and best line of defense.” Simon notes that a few of his accounts have been leaked in database breaches. Some of the services he uses, such as Adobe, Patreon, and Roll20, suffered leaks, and his account was included in the leaked info. “It taught me a good lesson about using an alternate password for every account!” I’ve had a few different types of breaches. I have a few sites of my own, and they have been breached, of course. There was also a time that TurboTax was having a lot of difficulties with data breaches. We filed our taxes that year with TurboTax and were told we had already filed. Someone had all our information and filed a false return. It took months to straighten that out. We no longer use TurboTax and now have someone do our taxes for us.
Your Opinion
Hopefully, if you’re like Sayak and Ryan, you haven’t gone through a data breach. But it’s quite possible that you’re like Odysseas, Simon, and myself and have gone through it, no matter how careful you have been with your security. Have you ever suffered a data breach? How did you deal with it? Tell us about it in the comments below.
