By now most people have heard about the huge data breach that took place in South Africa and has been all over the news. Initially, it was said that 30 million identies were compromised but recent announcements state that it's closer to 60 million. If you think about that, that's essentially every single person in South Africa considering that there are roughly 56 million South Africans.

We hear about data breaches now and then, and normally shrug them off. Did you know that in May, Zomato (restaurant guide website) was hacked and this resulted in almost 17 million of their accounts being exposed to the internet. This breach contained people's email addresses, names and salted MD5 hashes of passwords. If you're one of those people who use one password, there's a good chance that someone could access your bank account or the likes. This is no joke. Again, most of us ignore this sort of thing thinking that we'll be fine. It's time to take these sort of things more seriously in South Africa and understand the magnitude and possible damage a breach could cause you!

So, with yesterday's data breach, what does this mean? Well, it means that there's a very good chance that there are multiple parties who now have access to a lot of your sensitive information (name, ID number, email address, phone number, etc). This sort of information sells for millions of Rands on the dark web and the people who buy this information do so to make further money by exploiting the details. Whether this is through identity theft, illegal account access or whatever the method might be, either way it could become a really big problem for you.

There's a website that has existed for many years that allows you to enter your email address in, and in turn it will tell you if you've been compromised on the internet, you may use it here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/ - If you have been compromised, it's a really good idea to change your passwords on sensitive websites such as your bank.

We should give a big thanks to Troy Hunt, an Australian security developer who noticed the breach and reached out to South Africa to alert all of us. There are lots of investigations going on into finding out where the breach took place and Home Affairs are now involved too.