— This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on November 7, 2018, Wednesday.
So far this year, data leak scandals have been going on, from government systems to brands to social media giants like Google and Facebook. Let's take a couple of examples at three levels. First of all, on the government side,
In January, India's database that has1 billion citizenship data was been hacked. The database, called ADHAR, is important because it contains sensitive information such as fingerprint iris records, in addition to citizens' names, phone Numbers, email addresses and so on. There is no doubt that this event has attracted global attention. At the same time, that has strengthened the attention of the government and the public on data security in India
This is the influence to the government. In terms of brand enterprises, data theft cases have been emerging frequently this year。On March 25 of this year, for example, Under Armour, a leading U.S. sportswear brand, said it had lost data on 150 million customers
The channel that was leaked was My FitnessPal, a food and nutrition themed app owned by the company, to track users' daily health data. The company said the affected user data, including username email addresses and encrypted passwords, but did not touch other private users' information.
After the incident breaking, the company began cooperating with data security companies, regulators were also involved. Furthermore, the data theft influence of social media giants like Facebook and Google is even greater, the most controversial is a data firm called Cambridge Analytica illegally collected the personal information of 50 million Facebook users in March.
Then, on September 25, Facebook engineers discovered a program vulnerability, estimating nearly 50 million users' information is exposure to hackers. On October 12, Facebook officially released the results of an investigation that the profiles of 29 million users had been leaked, to the series of scandals, the British government announced in late October that it had formally fined Facebook 500,000 pounds
Another big blow to Facebook may be the fine from the EU. GDPR taking effectively this year is a milestone, that means under this new and the strictest EU regulation, Facebook may have to pay $1.63 billion fine in Europe, Google was also involved in data scandal.
In early October, the media reported that Google had discovered in an internal investigation this spring that a software flaw could allow outside developers to gain access to the private data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users. Although Google later fixed the bug, Google chose to hide it from the public because of concerns that the data breach would trigger more strict regulatory scrutiny and impact on the company's reputation. Google immediately announced a series of privacy policies, including phasing out the consumer version of Google+ over the next 10 months.
In addition, Google said it is reducing the number of external developers who can access user data on Android smartphones and email. Therefore, it can be seen that the data leakage scandal is causing the government, brand enterprises and social media to comprehensively review their data security, including Facebook and other companies to promise to increase investment in data security, vowing to address data security issues by the end of 2019. But the fight against cybercrime is expected to be a long one. Research shows that the economic losses from cybercrime are expected to reach $6 trillion by the middle of 2021, doubling from $3 trillion in 2015. Meanwhile, companies will spend more than $1 trillion on cybersecurity in the five years between 2017 and 2021. At the same time, there will be greater demand for professionals in cyber security, which is expected to be in short supply by 2019, with a shortage of 1.5 million talents.