Based on the research conducted in this paper, will give a clear view and understanding of the importance in protection of personal information and the implication of cyber security in personal data protection.

• The paper will try to answer all identified questions in relation to the issues with personal information security
• Readers will be able to understand their responsibilities vs organizations in protection of personal information
• Gives a clear view on how personal data are exploited and used mechanisms
• Evaluate the risk and propose countermeasures to protect personal data
• Good understand of privacy concerns in regard to personal information

Personal information has been referred to as any kind of information associated with a person that enable individual to be identified. This information is used by many organisations and institutions in various ways to enable them establish a legitimate communication. However, this has not always been the case as with the trend of technology, personal information can easily be misused by criminals or inappropriately used by institution for marketing purposes.

In respect to cyber security, in order to easily and successfully perform an attack, accurate information about the victim is needed for exploitation, the search is performed from all relevant sources regarding the victim. This includes web search, social engineering, public databases to know about the victim, in case of individual, the attacker establishes a relationship with the victim. This is known as an efficient way because all start with information and two major parties that carry all necessary information are individual and the computer system.

The concern about personal information security started from the relationship between privacy and the development of technology system. The discussion was conducted based on the development of computer devices in which individual personal data are collected, processed and stored. This is not the only concern as we are entering in the monitoring society with all available online platforms and the loss of privacy is increasing due to it protection strongly depend on political will, however, many governments focus on using the efficiency of technology for battle against terrorism and criminality than protecting the privacy of information. Therefore, we need to analyse and evaluate the use of technology system and the protection of personal information.

• Investigating how Personal information is being handled by organizations and individuals and find the best way to handle personal data
• What are the privacy concerns and their effect on personal information disclosure and protection?
• What are the responsibilities between individuals, organizations and government in protection of personal information?
• How personal information is being exploited for cyber crime and mechanism to protect against exploitation
• Investigate how Personal information are being classified and prioritized
• Research on the types of attack can be used over personal information exploitation
• What’s the security measures and mechanism to be used in personal information handling
• Provide recommendation on security of personal data

The aim for this research is to investigate and analyse the issues and concerns around security of personal information, how the personal information is being handled by both individual and organisation against cyber-crime and attacks, to investigate the responsibilities from both parties in protection of sensitive information, to evaluate the privacy concerns around sharing and disclosure of information and how personal information can be exploited to conduct malicious activities. In addition, this research intends to find method/approaches to protect, detect and prevent against cyber-attacks over personal information.