Yahoo is hacked – what does it mean for each of us?

The recently announced 500 million Yahoo accounts hack is the biggest data breach yet seen. This incident led to compromising email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and answers to security questions, which is more than enough for an identity theft or compromising accounts on other online services.

Yahoo said in a statement: “Online intrusions and thefts by state-sponsored actors have become increasingly common across the technology industry.”

With each passing year, we see an increasing number of security breakdowns in industries nobody believed could be hacked or compromised.

“All of this compromised information is very useful for criminals in order to hijack user identities and use them for fraudulent purposes,” said Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner.

The data security has become one of the toughest challenges for businesses and individuals who rely on public services in managing their sensitive personal or business information. And there is no simple solution for this issue, except to move away from relying on the Cloud-based solutions where compromising your data is just a matter of time.

With the growing amount of data going through the Cloud-based infrastructure, future security breaches could be much more devastating, revealing anyone’s personal information for those who are willing to pay for it. That means “No” for using iCloud, Outlook.com or Google cloud for your business information and switching to solutions where you and only you own the data. You can no longer pretend your data is 100% safe in someone else’s hands.

“With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away.” said Steve Wozniak, Apple Co-Founder

At Akruto, we believe that data security is the number-one priority in 2016. That is why we created AkrutoSync, a software that allows users to avoid using the Cloud for managing their personal data they keep in Microsoft Outlook, such as contacts, calendar, tasks and notes. AkrutoSync runs on your computer, not in the cloud, and provides safe syncing of your Outlook data between smartphones, tablets and computers via SSL-secured Wi-Fi or Internet connection.