IDX President and CEO Tom Kelly Responds to Major Data Breach in China

As featured on Fortune

In a post shared last week on a popular online forum, a hacker called ChinaDan claimed to have stolen 23 terabytes of personal data from 1 billion Chinese citizens. The breach has since been traced back to a compromised Shanghai police database and amounts to one of the largest data breaches in history.

Tom Kelly, president and CEO of IDX, spoke with Fortune to discuss what factors contributed to the data breach in China and the broader cybersecurity implications of such an attack.

Tom noted that the hack appeared to have been the result of a “careless” mistake made by one Chinese government employee. In other words, all it takes is for just one employee to make a mistake that hackers can use to breach your system and steal sensitive data.

“Someone inadvertently left a web portal unprotected, and accessing the database was as simple as scraping log-in information from the portal,” Tom said. “Hackers are always looking for entry points, and all it takes is one wrong move, and they’ll pounce.”

Moreover, the incident revealed how China is especially vulnerable to a major data breach. China’s government collects an immense amount of granular data on its population at every level, and now it is becoming more difficult to protect that information.

China is not alone in facing the threat of data breaches; government agencies and enterprises in the United States have been affected by similar breaches as well. But the tools you need to protect your information are available to you. Visit our business solutions or personal plans page to see how IDX privacy protection software can help you.