Online shopping has increased rapidly in recent days, due to many reasons with one being the pandemic eruption and also the convenience of customers has increased with online shopping. In online shopping customers are anxious about the sellers and vice versa.
The website provides minimal description about the seller but complete details about the product and the reviews are seen regarding the product usage. But when it comes to the customers, complete details are taken which includes name, contact number, email address, location, bank details for online payments and many more. Few apps even get access to documents on the phone and users have to be careful while giving such access as the right is in the hands of the users.
In recent days data breach has become very common. The list of companies in which such a breach is happening is growing rapidly. Dominos and Air India are the companies to join the list in the recent days. An Israel based cybercrime company found out that the hackers have information of Dominos and Air India.
Dominos is a US based multinational pizza restaurant chain which has walk in and home delivery services to customers. When it comes to home delivery services it is obvious that many details of the customers are taken for providing better services. It is found that over 18 crore orders of Indian customers have been leaked which includes sensitive information about the customers. Parent company is accepting that the data had been breached but is giving surety that financial data has not been leaked as they don’t save the financial details of the customers. Data base from 2015 to 2021 has been leaked. Hackers have demanded money to sell those details but when no one turned up they leaked the data online for free by creating a search portal
Air India is the flag carrier of airlines of India. It was founded 74 years ago and has both domestic and international flights. The services provided are consistent and customer loyalty is evident over the years. But Air India Limited has joined the list of companies whose customer’s sensitive details have been leaked. Data of more than 4.5 million passengers from 2015 to 2021 has been leaked for free. But the company, on knowing the violation, has taken few steps to protect the data. They have started the investigation of the data breach incident. They have given surety on securing the compromised servers and also have notified the credit card user about the incident.
Data breach or leak of data may sound simple to few people as only names, email address, contact number and such other personal details is being leaked but it is said that by only using such data people can be scammed and one of the frequent scam is OTP scam and there are many types of scam through which people can be cheated upon.
There are ways through which we can by ourselves protect the data from being stored in the company’s servers. There are many ways:
- Provide minimum data to any website or apps. If the questions are not required avoid providing those data to the company.
- While providing credit card details, few companies give an option to save your details with the website. Avoid giving those permissions.
- While creating accounts on different websites make sure to create different passwords for each website and also they are not in the same pattern. The lengthy and complicated passwords become difficult for hackers to decode.
- Always use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) while browsing on the internet to keep your location data secure. IP address discloses the location of the browser and VPN helps to hide such details.
- Anytime you receive an SMS saying that a wrong CVV is entered or a wrong pin entered then it must be taken seriously and informed to the respective banks so that the card will be blocked immediately. It can be an indication that the hacker has all the bank details but not the CVV number. So we being quick can help the hacker not to reach the CVV number by trying again and again.
- Never share your OTP with any person. The OTP is generated for us to login to any particular website and any other person will never require the OTP other than you.
- In a few websites security questions will be asked which can be easily available on the internet publicly. Answer wisely to these questions as these can also help the hackers to reach your data.
- The operating systems of phones and the software of the computer must be updated to the latest version as the previous versions will have loopholes using which hackers can get access to your data.
- While logging into any website you must be sure that the URL of that website is starting from “HTTPS” or just “HTTP”. If it has the letter ‘S’ it means that the website is secured and the chances of the personal details getting leaked is minimal.
There are a lot of data breaches that happen in the country with various companies. Few own up the responsibility while few try to cover it up with reasons. The Government also has a wide role to play in these incidents. Even after so many cases coming up with similar loopholes the Government has not yet formed a proper Data Protection Law to protect the customers of various companies from being scammed in various methods. It is for sure that nothing is not taken or done for free by anyone. The personal details that the customers provide to the companies through their websites are sometimes sold to others.
