In the past weekend, I watched a CNA Insider video delving into Data Theft in Malaysia. It is titled “Data Theft in Malaysia: How your personal information may be exploited | Cyber Scammed”.
You can watch the 45-minute video below.
Such dire news is nothing new. We Malaysians are numbed to those telemarketers calling and messaging to offer their credit card services, loans, health spa services. You name it; there is something to sell. Of course, these “services” are mostly innocuous, but in recent years, the forms of scams are risen up several notches and severity levels. The levels of sophistication, the impacts, and the damages (counting financial and human casualties) have rocketed exponentially. Along with the news, mainstream and others, the levels of awareness and interests in data, especially PII (personal identifiable information) in Malaysians, are at its highest yet.
It is a disaster. No matter what we do, the leaks and the cracks are appearing faster than we are fixing it. It is a global pandemic.
I am not talking about COVID-19, the pandemic that has affected our lives and livelihood for over a year. I am talking about the other pandemic – the compromise of security of data.
In the past 6 months, the data leaks, the security hacks, the ransomware scourge have been more devastating than ever. Here are a few big ones that happened on a global scale:
