What you need to know
In August of 2018, Reddit, an online community with 330 million active users, announced that a security breach occurred. The company announced that a portion of its users’ data was stolen, and threatened the anonymity of the users who were affected.
Reddit is the third most visited website in the United States. As a community, Reddit relies on anonymity which allows users to discuss controversial topics. Currently, the site is home to 1.2 million subreddits, organized in forum style. Users are welcome to post news, personal stories, and ask for advice from the rest of the community.
The Reddit community made the concept of “doxing” famous. “Doxing” is the act of finding online information about a user and posting their details to remove their anonymity. The breach was not an act of doxing, but rather a hacking activity that gave hackers access to Reddit’s backend, where users’ private information is stored.
While the Reddit breach did not include secure data, like Social Security numbers, banking information or physical addresses, the breach compromised the users’ Reddit accounts and gave the hackers access to usernames, email addresses, and passwords. If the users employ the same password across multiple websites and platforms, the breach also made those accounts vulnerable, too.
What Does the Reddit Breach Mean?
Reddit was quickly on top of the breach and has deployed a system to identify users who were compromised. From there, compromised users had their accounts suspended until they changed their passwords. Once the password was changed, the user was reinstated.
In the grand scheme of things, the data breach may mean very little to most people. After all, critical information was not accessed by the hackers, but it is a stark reminder that online activity is never safe and that we, as individual users, must act to protect our information. When breaches happen, you must take a proactive approach to deal with it, and you, as a user, must secure your information across multiple platforms.
What Should I be Doing to Protect My Data?
Whether or not you were one of the people who was impacted by the Reddit data breach, you’ll want to take steps to secure your personal identifying information. Technology experts suggest taking the following steps to keep your information safe online
- Never use the same password on multiple platforms. If your data is compromised on one platform, you’ll need to change the password across all the platforms that share the same login credentials.
- When a website or application offers two-step verification, use it. Yes, it is annoying in some cases, but having two-step verification ensures your accounts are more secure, even if your password falls into the hands of the wrong person.
- Avoid saving passwords for essential websites, like your bank and credit card accounts on your computer or your phone. If a phone is lost or stolen, any collected data is easily accessible to the thief. Even if the phone or computer stays in your line of sight, your information can be gleaned by viruses.
- Keep up-to-date on recent data breaches. You can set up Google Alerts to let you know when news of a data breach has dropped. The quicker you act based on the report, the safer your information will be.
- Do not open files from unknown senders, and never give out your password information via email or on an obscure website.
- Only use secure websites. Look for sites that have an HTTPS: web address. The S ensures the website is encrypted and secured. This means that hackers cannot intercept your data as you are typing it in.
The Bottom Line
The online world is a valuable resource, and it is now a necessity to exist and work today, but just with anything else, some bad people exist online. Hackers are often after secure data. The reason behind the hacks varies from selling usernames and passwords, to attempting to access user’s sensitive information. The reason doesn’t matter in the end, though. Follow the above tips to stay vigilant and keep yourself safe online.
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