Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company recently fell victim to a data breach. The hacker who goes by the name of Optusdata claimed to have stolen 11.2 million sensitive customer records – threatening to sell the data if the organization did not pay $1M USD in  Monero cryptocurrency.

Another data breach has disrupted the Twitterverse as the social network giant confirmed a recent data breach that left 5.4 million user account profiles vulnerable.

No this isn’t a case of déjà vu – T-Mobile suffered another data breach – their fifth in just three years. According to Forrester Research security and risk analyst Allie Mellen this is “the worst breach” to date.  In a published statement on August 20, 2021, the popular wireless carrier company announced that hackers were able to steal sensitive data of over 40 million customers who applied for credit with the company. This includes both social security numbers (SSN) as well as drivers license numbers.  

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Clubhouse databases were not breached – according to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Clubhouse. Instead - the three social media platforms say they were targets of data scraping which is super different than an out right data breach. So while your personal information is definitely floating around on the dark web thanks to these “data scraping” incidents– the CEOs of these three companies don’t want you to worry. While data scraping is technically legal – you should be concerned about these recent incidents if you ever stored sensitive information on any of these accounts.