Beware of Data Theft

Some time ago I watched a dramatized video on the subject of data theft. A lady goes to a mobile shop to buy a new mobile. The shop keeper offers her a handsome amount for selling her older mobile phone to him. The girl seems reluctant because the mobile contains personal data. Her friend suggests her to delete the data and reset the mobile at once to take advantage of the offer. The lady does the same and sells her mobile without any worries.

After she leaves the shop, the shopkeeper retrieves all the deleted data back and gets ready to utilize it for his evil purposes. Either he sells the data to dark web or uses it to blackmail the person in question.

The shopkeeper does this act of data stealing with all of his customers. He retrieves the deleted data from the sold phones. He also steals the data from the devices that are brought to him for repairing. He tells such customers to come after a few hours to get their repaired device. During that time, he copies all the data.

Watching this video scared me a lot because I had a mobile that needed to be repaired. Like every other person, I have some sensitive information in my device, my hive account, Binance account, Gmail account, crypto wallets, passwords and other keys. Landing any of such information in the hand of a stranger is dangerous.

I am a person who has a kind of fear of cyber technology. It looks cumbersome to me to learn and apply many things regarding security. So the method I use for the security is to avoid the risk as much as possible.

I avoid downloading any unnecessary apps, and before downloading any app I read carefully what kind of access permissions it asks for. If anything puts me in doubt, I’d rather live without the app.

I no longer save my passwords in Google account as any breaches in the website or any data stealing from my mobile may cause harm to me.

Also, I have become prudent about clicking any suspicious phishing link. Previously, I used to click but now I avoid to be impressed by any offers that appear too good to be true.

Besides, I avoid keeping my personal photographs in my phone or any other ladies’ of the family, as cases of blackmailing have been witnessed by utilizing edited and photo-shopped photographs.

My brother is a software engineer. I have seen him applying multiple security layers on his device. As I told earlier that I feel it difficult to learn these skills. However, I am feeling the need to do so.

When I told my brother about the data theft dramatized video, he told me that after deleting the data if we overwrite the drive i.e. fill it with another data and then delete it, the previous data cannot be retrieved. So in case we are going to sell our phone, we should use this technique.

Thankfully I haven’t suffered from cyber security issues. However, I always have a fear of being inflicted. I have seen the account of several skillful persons being hacked.

Lately the discord and twitter account of our dear @kenechukwu97 was hacked. The hacker utilizing his identity sent phishing and scamming links to several people in dm. Kene acted swiftly to spread the word about the account being hacked. Nevertheless, there is still possibility that the hacker may scam people using his account.

Some years ago, a more terrible incident happened to our lovely @dreemsteem. Six Ethreum and some BCH were stolen from her crypto wallet. That amount was never be retrieved. It was such a big amount for us to think let alone lose it. We saw her crying for the first time, and we cried with her.

These incidents have taught me the critical importance of cybersecurity. Though I have not personally suffered from a significant cyber attack, the fear and potential risks have pushed me to be more vigilant. In this era of digitalization, it is not possible to be secure 100%. However, we must educate us about the tools and methods to safeguard our personal information so the risk of attack may be reduced.

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This post is my response to Hl-featured contest prompt week 124 edition 2

Image created by me using Bing AI.