DATA SECURITY IN THE CYBER SPACE

With the fourth industrial revolution at its peak, technology is the driving force of most innovations and developments. Data has become a prime content of interest to everyone in the digital space coupled along with its transit and storage.

Data refers to representation of facts, concepts or instructions in formalized manner. Information processed and stored by a computer can also be referred to as data.

Data security on the other hand is defined as a practice of protecting digital information from unauthorized access, theft or corruption during its entire cycle. It begins at an individual level to organization and then government level.

In August 2020, elite gaming brand Razer experienced data breach which exposed the personal information of approximately 100,000 customers. This incident took them nearly a month to securely restore their systems to full working capacity.

As individuals, many times we do things in the cyber space unknowingly which leads to data breaches. At this level, your identity is the primary target which involves both offline and online data. Offline identity refers to your daily life that includes how you live and what you do while online identity refers to data you present online that includes the information you input on social platforms, online job applications and online account setups that require your personal data (date of birth, location, name, contact, email address). The best way to secure individual data is to limit the amount of personal information you reveal online.

At organizational/company level, data protection is everyone’s responsibility. This is because customer’s details, organization classified documents and other information are stored with the digital infrastructures owned or hired. One of the major threats to such data are the internal forces that knowingly or unknowingly get involved with external forces and cause data breaches usually as a result of the system being compromised by competitors.

To the large group that is government, large amounts of data are used to run and manage the day to date affairs of the country which include national security, economic stability and wellbeing of all citizens. This shows that every sector depends on data for their smooth operations however all this information is stored through cloud and virtualization. At government level, data breaches usually occur as a result of cyberwarfare because most attacks are attributed to one nation spying on the other by trying to access their data without authorization.

In the current cyberspace, there are a number of people who want your data;

Internet service providers (ISP); Share your data with government and sell data to advertisers for profits.

Advertisers; Monitor and track your online activities such as shopping habits and personal preferences and send targeted ads your way.

Search engines & social media platforms; Here data, which is gathered include gender, geo location, phone number, political & religious ideologies based on your search histories and online identity.   

Websites: Sites visited track your activities in order to provide a more personalized experience.

Amidst all these events, there are tested and proven ways to keep online data secure and they include; using two factor authentication (2FA), data encryption, identity proofing, using hash function or checksum to provide integrity, performing hardware repairs, keeping operating systems & softwares up to date, creating backups, awareness training for employees, setting up firewalls on devices and lastly, avoid inserting flash disks from unknown sources. All these measures can be carried out at individual, organizational & government level.

In conclusion, technology exists because there is data. “Privacy is the price we pay for the digital convince.”