Impact of Exposing Personal Data Research Proposal

Impact of Exposing Personal Data - Research Proposal Example Customers provide information online due to many reasons, but most importantly, they provide information mostly on the website. Due to the lack of technology and measures of customer personal privacy, online businesses fail to protect their database by security breaches conducted by hackers or cybercriminals. The data including all the personal information of the customer is breached resulting in exposure of thousands of authentic customer personal information and financial status. In order to conduct a security breach on the web server, cybercriminals use the Internet, as a carrier along with intelligent codes that are purposefully constructed to extract confidential information, the most favorable point of attack is the web server. The information that is provided online by the users is gathered in a database that is connected to the web server. Hackers and cyber criminals deploy various methods to attack web servers in order to extract information that is stored in the database. D ue to this reason, business suffers severe losses from data theft issues as in 2009 investigators related to data breach reported from Verizon business that crooks nabbed 285 million records. (Larkin 2009) Peter Tippett, who is the author of the report and vice president of innovation and technology with Verizon Business, says that the report includes all the IP addresses associated with the account that is used in the thefts, and criminals are identified only because of in-depth investigations by collaborative support of law enforcement agencies including FBI and Scotland Yard,. From this particular report, 90 security breaches were studied out of which 68 were reversed for further investigation to a specific IP address and location. The conclusions highlighted Eastern Europe as a common source followed by East Asia and North America (Larkin 2009). 1.1 Social Networking Sites Moreover, social network sites are another domain that is of prime concerned, in the context of exposing pe rsonal privacy. People are spending an enormous amount of time on these websites, and are becoming habitual of online communication, which portrays a negative impact on face-to-face communication. The teenagers are not aware that the information and published material including pictures can be retrieved even after deletion from the social networking site. By oversharing, personal information may attract cybercriminals, burglars and even employers who can evaluate values of a person by reviewing comments on the site that may compromise the individual to lose his job. There is no credibility of the user authentication of what they are claiming to be on social networking sites. Users trust textual communication from these social networking sites more than emails. The security of these websites can be compromised anytime and can publish communication or personal pictures on the web if breached.