Picture every book in every library, school, home, and company in the entire world – it’s a lot of books. If you were to combine all those books they would only account for 6% of all human data. It is estimated that today 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced everyday (that’s 2.5 followed by 18 zeros!!)
Large companies use Big Data to better understand consumer behaviour and preferences. Big Data includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage and process data within a tolerable amount of time (SAS.com).
Data breaches are becoming more and more common as businesses of all sizes become increasingly reliant on digital data. The breaches have also become larger in numbers and impact. 30 years ago, a data breach could be something as simple as reading someone’s medical file without authorization, nowadays it’s not so simple.
Large companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft store data in data centres. As all the electronic components generate heat when they are in operation, a lot of heat is produced. If this heat isn’t controlled the processors overheat and could fail. So cooling a data centre is pretty crucial. When the outside air temperature is below 12°C, outside air can be used to help regulate the temperatures. Most of the energy used to power data centres is drawn from the local grid, but solar power is also sometimes used to power some auxiliary systems.
Australian web security expert Troy Hunt, was analysing trends in data breaches he noticed that large data breaches affect millions of people, some of whom have no idea that their data has even been compromised.
Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) gives the general public a quick and easy way to check if their private information has been compromised or breached. The site also provides you with specific details about the breach i.e. the backstory and what type of information was compromised. Have I been Pwned lets you sign up to get a free email notification if and when your private information is included in a breach. HIBP has around 10,000 visitors a day and 350,000 people signed up to be notified of data breaches.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Check out Troy’s site to find out whether you’ve been the victim of a data breach.
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