No Matter the Size of Your Data, You Must Prevent Them from a Data Breach.
Recent research (2020) by CybelAngel found that more than 90% of data breaches are due to negligence that might have been prevented with cybersecurity training, processes, procedures, and tools. Examples of these incidents include:
An overzealous or new employee previous security procedures for simplicity or time saving
An IT employee involved in shadowing other corporate IT operation activities
A third-party vendor leaving a server open with sensitive documents exposed
The possibilities are endless, as are the risks. (ref)
What is a Data Breach?
Before we explore the world of data breach, let us have a shared understanding of Data Breach. A Data Breach is an incident wherein information is stolen or taken from a system without the knowledge or authorization of the system's owner. The data breach can happen because of some common causes as follows (ref):
Weak and Stolen Credentials, a.k.a. Passwords ·
Back Doors, which are the vulnerabilities within the application.
Malware. ·
Social Engineering ·
Too Many Permissions, not implementing the least priviledge principle.
Insider Threats.
Physical Attacks.
Improper Configuration or User Error.
How to identify a data breach?
To acknowledge that a data breach just happened to our application system, we can follow through with the following shreds of evidence:
Unusual login activity
Unusual file changes and database manipulation
The appearance of suspicious or unknown files
Locked accounts and changed user credentials
Missing funds or assets, such as intellectual property or sensitive data
Abnormal admin activity
Reduced internet speed (because of the addition of suspicious users)
What is the worst case if your data gets breach?
Data leaks can reveal everything from social security numbers to banking information. Once a criminal has these details, they can engage in all types of fraud under your name. Theft of your identity can ruin your credit, pin you with legal issues, and it is difficult to fight back against. Therefore, it is essential to prevent our confidential data from spreading uncontrollably.
What are the top 3 data breach cases all over the world
1. Yahoo!
It happened during the year 2013-2016. The impacts are enormous due to over 3 billion user accounts being exposed. The data breach of Yahoo is one of the worst and most infamous cases of a known cyberattack and currently holds the record for the most people affected. The first attack occurred in 2013, and many more would continue over the next three years.
2. Microsoft
In Microsoft, the event last for one month only. It was January of 2021 year when impacting 30,000 US companies (60,000 companies worldwide).
In one of the largest cyberattacks in US history, over 30,000 US businesses were affected by a sweeping attack on the Microsoft Exchange email servers, one of the largest email servers in the world. The hackers were able to exploit four different zero-day vulnerabilities that allowed them to gain unauthorized access to emails from small businesses to local governments.
3. Facebook
The company’s massive data breach in April 2021 was one of its largest, leaking the names, phone numbers, account names, and passwords of over 530 million people to the public. Facebook identified the problem in the platform’s tool to sync contacts, citing hackers exploiting a vulnerability to scrape user profiles for customer data.
Although one of the world’s largest companies, Facebook is no stranger to data leaks and controversy. The social media giant has constantly dealt with security breaches of user data since the company went public in 2012.
We can understand right now that a data breach scale of damage can be massive. Therefore, we shall prevent it from being stolen, no matter the size of our data. Now, what cybersecurity activities we can do are listed below.
How To Prevent Data Breaches
Inventory all data sets and identify locations of sensitive information
Strictly limit privileged access ·
Patch infrastructure ·
Secure the network
Secure endpoints
Limit lateral movement
Encrypt data at rest and in transit
Implement proper password policies
Subscribe to a defacement monitoring tool like SentryPage.
Conclusion
We already understand throughout this article that data breach is necessary to prevent because it is dangerous. We shall have cybersecurity policies to inhibit the data breach going to happening. At least there are eight cybersecurity activities to do to avoid data breaches. But, we must implement and comply with it assertively due to most data breach events involving irresponsible behavior from the people.
Last but not least, we can subscribe to a defacement tool like SentryPage. It is a curative tool for cyberattacks. Using SentryPage, users will be alerted whenever a suspicious change happens on our webpage. The subscription is quite flexible using credit-based payment. Subscribe now and get 1,000 credits for free.
