Question

In this week's case study, we explored the cyber attack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the data breach of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). I was one of the people who received a letter from OPM telling me that my PII might have been stolen. I received credit monitoring services free of charge to help prevent my PII being used for financial gain through identity theft.

For this week's discussion board, select a way that an attacker could use PII that wouldn't be caught by credit monitoring . Answer the following questions:

• What concern about the use of PII are you discussing?
• How might this use of my PII impact me?
• What could I do to protect myself against this concern?

Answer 1

There are many ways an attacker could use your PII and it won’t be caught by Credit Monitoring. Credit monitoring cannot catch if a person is using your PII in order to apply for a job using your information.

Concerns about the use of PII and their impact on you:

  1. Internet black market is a place where hackers sell PII anonymously for the high prices.

2. Sometimes hackers can feed on your fear of losing personal information and demand a certain amount of money to keep your data intact.

3. Your PII can be used to

• Buy a new cell phone using your information
• Open a new account using your SSN
• Sell your PII to marketing firms
• Sell your PII to spam campaign organizers
• Gain access to your company's group chat system
• Steal your flyer miles
• Buy drugs from your healthcare account
• Pretend to be a student of an institution for educational purpose

Steps of protection against these concerns:

  Strong and different passwords:

Use different strong passwords for different accounts. Change the passwords regularly

Backup your data:

Delete stagnant data and have your data backup on a secure offsite location. This way you don't have to be worried about your data loss by hacking attempts.

Encryption:

Encrypt sensitive data and accounts such as emails, call logs or any other important files. In the outlook, the email-security option is very handy here.

  2FA or MFA:

2 Factor or Multi-factor Authentication allows filling in lots of information before actually gaining access to an account. Such as an answer to a question, OTP on mobile, etc. This can also secure your accounts.

Use of Network:

Always use a secure WIFI and never public wifi. If there is urgency and you have to use public WIFI, then opt for a VPN.

Use HTTPS:

Perform your transactions on secure sites. Secure sites have HTTPS in their URL. Especially when you are performing financial transactions.

Limit Cloud:

Don't upload sensitive data to the cloud. Although the cloud is considered to be secure, there are many ways hackers can use your PII to access your data on the cloud.

Firewall and anti-malware:

Use genuine firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-malware on your system. That way hackers cannot penetrate into your system using your PII.

  Go Incognito:

If you are aware of this mode in browsing, you better be knowing that it doesn't leave data footprints after browsing and hence there is no trail left of your online activities.

Clear cookies:

Cookies are used to confirm a person's identity on a specific site. Cookies save your information for the next visit. Hackers can easily filter through cookies and gain entry into your accounts even when they don’t know the passwords. Always clear cookies.