Data Risk Awareness

People have varying appetites for risk, in various situations and circumstances and that is natural. But have we generally become complacent or even blase about our own personal data?

There was a time when important personal information was stored in banks or in our own houses. I can remember my own mother storing certificates, rent books, insurance documents etc in a biscuit tin, with her thinking being that should there be a fire, the documents might still survive.

Those days have largely gone in most parts of the world and we have moved on from cheque books and cash, to cards and now to mobile phones and watches within which to store or have access to our treasure chest of data and assets.

This continues, in spite of repeated instances where computer systems have been hacked, be they banks or other institutions, potentially giving access to criminals to thousands of records about individuals, banking details, home details, birth and marriage details etc, so offering a great swathe of information about ourselves to an ever increasing number of people. Even with identity theft being on the increase.

It doesn't even need to be a malicious act, as we saw last week with the DOGE team in the US who made available information on their own website for anyone to view, through, what we hope was just a mistake, a lack of control or governance but once done, it cannot easily be undone and it is likely we will never know how damaging that information might prove to be.

So, we routinely put our worlds into items that we routinely carry around with us, leave on tables, desks, chairs, trains, taxis and buses assuming that someone else, we do not know is vigilantly guarding our possessions for us. Assuming that anything in the cloud is secure by definition and trusting that no harm will ever come of it, even though we are reminded on an almost daily basis of the threat of cyber crime, which is a business on its own.

At the same time, over the same period of passing, we would rarely if ever consider leaving our front doors open, for fear of someone entering that we would not want to, without realising that they don't need to break into our houses anymore to steal from us because we have as a society made it much easier and reduced the risk for would be criminals by our own inability to assess risks and trust companies who may not even be subject to the laws of the country we live in.

DLP or data loss prevention is a key area for cyber security companies and especially big corporates but with eight billion people in the world, isn't that a more attractive prey for the criminals, than the corporates who spend millions in trying to protect theirs?

Our currency is increasingly our data but how much do we think about protecting it?