Everyone Has A Secret

People are seldom an entirely open book. It’s common sense and rational to keep some stuff like financial and medical records away from prying eyes. For others, it can be something trivial and silly (say, an embarrassing taste in music) to the more serious (like a traumatic event in one’s past).

With so many methods of sharing, keeping things private is increasingly becoming more difficult. Websites and services often ask for personal information and track users’ online habits to provide a more “customized” experience. Despite methods of sharing within a select group, sharing online has practically become synonymous with sharing with the public. No matter the privacy level of an account, anything posted online will sooner or later find its way to the public.

This kind of activity is driving some users to reconsider the amount of information they are willing to share. In 2014, we will see users exert more effort in learning tools that can protect their data and control what they share online. This year will be about making sure that secrets remain secret.

It’s not just individuals who have secrets to keep. So do businesses. These can include their future plans and strategies, to their current procedures, to personnel records of their employees and clients. Exposed to the public – and their competitors – these can cost a business millions, and perhaps in an absolute worst case, drive them out of business completely.

Protecting data should become every organization’s top priority this year, considering that we will see one major data breach incident per month. 2013 was marked by several major data breaches and we will see such incidents continue this year.

As part of our 2014 predictions, we developed this video, with the help of our CTO Raimund Genes, to talk about what users and organizations can do to protect themselves and keep their secrets secret in today’s digital landscape:

So what can you do to protect your secrets? Our advice to users will help here: avoid oversharing on social media. Don’t bank or shop online on sites that you don’t trust. Keep track of you data, wherever it is – whether it’s in the cloud, or on one of your devices. In short, being a good citizen of the Internet will help in keeping your secrets away from cybercriminals and other such bad actors found online.

For more concrete steps that outline what you can do to protect your secrets, you can visit the Secrets website, which is part of our broader 2014 predictions.

Post from: Trendlabs Security Intelligence Blog – by Trend Micro

Everyone Has A Secret