In August of 2018 Bob Diachenko, Director of Cyber Risk Research at Hacken.io found that over 2 million Mexican citizens had their healthcare data leaked due to a security vulnerability in a system's database. At that same time, he found that the data of 93 thousand users of a popular babysitting app, Sitter, was also exposed. As if this isn't scary enough, in November, Marriott Corporation revealed that over the last four years hackers had broken into its reservation system and stealing the private data of over 500 million customers. That's more than the combined population of Russia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain combined!
Given the security breaches that have occurred at places like Facebook (50 million profiles), Equifax (143 million), Yahoo (3 billion), eBay (145 million) and surprisingly, Adult Friend Finder (412 million), you'd think that companies would learn from one another. Many have, and yet, many have not. Data theft is still an all too common occurrence in the digital landscape. That's the bad news. The good news is that security has become a company-wide concern, not something relegated to a few compliance officers sitting in isolation in the data center. Companies have come to understand that everybody has a role in making sure that its digital infrastructure is secure and protected. This includes test practitioners and QA personnel.