What to do in case of a global security breach

The bitter truth is, everyone in the world is vulnerable to cybercriminals. Even the biggest companies, ones that hold tons of user data, are no exception. On the contrary, they are a likely target.

Have you ever thought about how many global security breaches took place in the past few years? Check out the list of the biggest breaches ever, and you’ll see that — no surprise — 10 of 16 happened during the last four years. Take, for example, the latest news about Yahoo: In early October, the company revealed that every single Yahoo account (about 3 billion total) had been hacked in its major 2013 security breach. The stolen data included e-mails, names, phone numbers, dates of birth, and in some cases, security questions and answers.

The bad news is that nobody can be sure of being fully protected from breaches of that kind. The good news is that if you react in time and don’t neglect security, you most likely won’t get hurt by those breaches.

We at Kaspersky Lab have been thinking about a solution that can protect people beyond their own devices — something that protects their digital identities as well. Such a solution would have to keep people posted about any global cybercatastrophes threatening their security, and help them protect their data in cloud services. The ideas that we came up with became a part of our Kaspersky Security Cloud.

This is the first consumer cloud security solution, and it’s key difference from all other security products is that it adapts to you and your lifestyle to provide security right where you need it. How does that apply to those global breaches?

What happens if a service you’ve been using is breached and you’ve been reusing the same passwords for other services? Your other accounts might get stolen as well. You need a different password for every site and every service. However, creating lots of strong and unique passwords is not so easy; the stronger passwords are, the easier they are to forget. That’s the first and foremost excuse people use for having just a few passwords for all of their services, and it is why a breach of just one service can turn into a nightmare for lots of people.

The solution to keeping all of your other passwords safe in the event of one breach is Password Manager. It creates strong and unique passwords for different accounts, and it fills them in for you automatically, so you don’t need to remember them. The only password you’ll need to remember is the master password to unlock Password Manager.

So, in case of a global breach, Password Manager helps keep all other accounts secure. But what about that one account, the one that was exposed in the breach?

Usually, the worst effects occur right after news of a breach goes public. The most important thing in case of such an emergency is to learn about what happened as soon as possible so that you can take appropriate steps. Kaspersky Security Cloud provides you with news alerts that are specifically relevant to your security. They appear on your devices as notifications and contain brief and important information about what happened and what you can do to protect yourself in case your security solution cannot handle such a threat.

For example, if you are or were ever a Yahoo customer, as soon as the news about the breach went public, Kaspersky Security Cloud would’ve sent you a notification about the breach along with advice to change that password as soon as possible.

The point is, security breaches happen. They always have and, unfortunately, probably always will. You can’t predict them or avoid all of their effects. But you can take steps such as controlling and managing different accounts and passwords intelligently, and staying up to date with security news to protect your data despite the breaches that are out of your control. Kaspersky Security Cloud is there to help you with that.