Data Breaches - Staying safe online in 21st Century

A breach of data is a reported occurrence where private, sensitive, or covered records have been compromised and/or released unlawfully mostly due to cyber attacks or theft. Breach of data can include personal health records, personal information, travel information, trade secrets, intellectual property, or information you provided to or is stored on a platform. Data revealed to breaches pose a security and privacy risk to Users around the world. Despite these, guidelines on how organizations can react to breaches, or how to manage information securely once it has leaked, still haveto be established. More than 3 billion people suffered and became victims of data breaches and cyber attacks in the last two decades leading to loss of personal data as well as monetary loss. This research paper conducts real time research about awareness of data privacy, kind of data/information that needs to be protected, basic protocols for staying safe online, and some of the biggest corporate data breaches that happened in this century. We bring people from different cities of India in this study through a survey and use the data provided by these 150 participants to examine their understanding of data privacy, their concern regarding their online data and the practices they follow in their daily life to keep their online data safe in this age of computers and internet.