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Whether you’re looking to protect your business, personal data or both, you need smart governance, protection and compliance.

A data breach is any unauthorized copying or transfer of sensitive information that leaves it exposed to the wrong people. These incidents can result from either deliberate cyberattacks or unintentional errors or oversights by employees. They can also be the result of security flaws and vulnerabilities in an organization’s infrastructure.

Criminals can use stolen data to commit identity theft and phishing attacks against you. For example, if they have access to your passwords and security questions, they can try to hack into other accounts like your bank or credit card to steal more information. They can even use your personal information to try to scam you out of money by pretending to be a trusted source such as your bank or government agency.

In the case of a large American web services provider, a data breach in 2013-2016 left the names and contact information of 3 billion users exposed to hackers. In this breach, cybercriminals were able to access personal information including addresses, birthdays and phone numbers; financial information such as bank account details, credit card number and payment information; and intellectual property information such as patents and copyrighted material.

The good news is, there are ways to mitigate the damage. Start by securing your passwords and PINs and using multi-factor authentication for all your online accounts. Also, if you’re notified that your personal information was part of a data breach, you should change the login info on all of your accounts that were affected.