When personal data becomes a weakness
Talking to Lao Dong Newspaper, Mr. Nguyen Cao Son (Quang Ninh) said that he was once a victim of a scam call a few years ago. At that time, a person claiming to be an employee of a service provider contacted him, provided some personal information and asked him to perform the confirmation steps on the phone.
At that time, I was also suspicious, but because the caller knew some of my information, I lost my vigilance. Luckily, I stopped in time before providing important information and transferring money," Mr. Son recounted.
After that time, Mr. Son became more cautious with strange calls and messages. For a long time, he did not encounter any more similar cases, so he gradually thought that the information he had provided might no longer be used.
But recently, messages with signs of fraud have reappeared. This time, the approach made Mr. Son pay more attention because the message content contained a lot of accurate information about himself.
A message informs the system that the data has not been updated, asking you to verify on the same day to avoid the account being suspended from trading. The message clearly states your full name, date of birth and phone number you are using, then leads to a link to check and verify information.
Last time they mainly tried to talk to make me believe. This time the messages already had a lot of information about me. I found the way of doing it much more sophisticated," Mr. Son said.
Because he had encountered a similar incident before, Mr. Son did not access the attached link but checked the information through official channels. After checking carefully, he realized that the link address was not the familiar website of the unit mentioned in the message.
According to Mr. Son, what worries him is not just a fake message but the fact that the sender is grasping a lot of accurate information about him.
Pieces of data pieced together into a scam scenario
Mr. Ngo Minh Hieu (Hieu PC) - Project Director of Anti-Fraudulent Fraud, member of the Vietnam National Cyber Security Association, said that personal data is not only valuable in each piece of information but also in the ability to connect data.
From the perspective of anti-fraud, Mr. Ngo Minh Hieu warned that the big risk lies in the fact that leaked data does not only exist in the form of simple phone number lists. They can be synthesized and classified into data groups with specific characteristics to serve different approach scenarios.
When the data is connected, the subject can know who a person is, what service they are using, what issues they may be interested in and choose the appropriate approach. Information that seems disjointed can therefore become "material" to build a personalized fraud scenario.
In the context of personal data being increasingly widely used in digital transactions and services, data protection is therefore not only aimed at keeping information confidential. It is also a layer of defense to limit the ability of bad actors to create a sufficiently convincing profile and turn users into targets of increasingly sophisticated scam scenarios.
