Victims of data breaches often become the target of cybercriminals.
To keep yourself safe after a data breach, our expert data breach lawyers have provided some helpful tips.
Information stolen in breaches is often used to commit cybercrimes. Privacy violations have resulted in fraud, blackmail, and identity theft, so data breach victims are at high risk of being targeted by cybercriminals. To stay safe, you should:
Phishing fraudsters contact you using emails, texts, and other forms of communication. They disguise themselves as someone you trust. Their goal is to trick you into giving them your personal information (e.g. usernames, passwords, credit card details, etc.) and steal from you.
Phishing often happens following a data breach. Criminals use the data exposed in breaches to trick people into believing they are genuine.
Stolen data is easy to buy on the dark web, so if you are the victim of a data privacy violation, it is quite likely that different criminals could be trying to use your data against you.
Stolen data is also used in batches over time, so the impact of a data breach might not be immediately apparent.
To stop a bad situation from getting even worse, if you are the victim of a data breach you should also :
Register with the Cifas protective registration service to slow down credit applications made in your name.
Change your passwords. You should also do this regularly and use a different password for every account (a password manager can help with this).
Protect your devices with up to date internet security software.
If you have been scammed, defrauded or experienced cybercrime in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, you should also report this to Action Fraud.
Once you make a report, Action Fraud will provide you with a police crime reference number and your case will be passed to the relevant local police force/law enforcement agency for investigation. Action Fraud does not investigate the cases and cannot advise you on the progress of a case.
It is important to make a report via Action Fraud as it uses this data to make reports and passes these to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB). The NFIB uses this data to identify serial offenders, organised crime groups and find emerging crime types.
Personal information describes any data that can identify an individual, either on its own or alongside other information. Organisations that use our personal data have a legal obligation to keep it safe. This is important because criminals regularly use stolen personal information to commit fraud, blackmail, and identity theft.
Even where a personal data breach is not caused by cybercriminals but by a simple mistake, the results can be devastating. As a result of admin errors and poor data security processes, data privacy violations can cause considerable distress, upset, embarrassment and harm.
At KP Law, we help people make compensation claims when an organisation has not looked after their personal information as well as it should have.
As well as helping individuals to make a claim, where multiple people have been affected by the same breach, we will run a group action.
We run our cases on a no-win, no-fee basis.
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