Practical Data Privacy

Chapter 4. Privacy Attacks

In this chapter, you’ll think like a security analyst and an attacker. Proactive privacy and security creates a cyclical approach, where you spend time envisioning potential threats and attacks and then experiment with how you can protect against them. Because security is never done, you continue this cycle as threats evolve and as your system changes.

When you complete the first round of interventions and mitigations, there is usually another round waiting for you. Since security is always evolving and so are new attacks, this chapter acts as a foundation for your understanding, but you’ll want to keep up-to-date by following research, trends, and threats.

Privacy Attacks: Analyzing Common Attack Vectors

Thinking like a security analyst requires knowing what is possible, what is probable, and how to best plan for potential attacks in a proactive, rather than reactive, way. In this section, you’ll analyze well-known attack vectors, where both researchers and curious data folks were able to reveal sensitive details meant to remain secret. By analyzing these attacks, you will build an understanding of the more common approaches to reveal sensitive data and be better able to protect data against them.

Netflix Prize Attack

You may think that your online behaviors are fairly general and nonidentifiable. Although some of your behaviors might be more common, such having a Gmail address, liking a popular post, or watching a popular video, there are likely ...